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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/27235
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/27235
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

This is the reality of the thing: there are hundreds of thousands of people who would like to have written a novel. Many of them are willing to spend a considerable amount of money to advance their ambitions. This creates a market for writing courses and books on how to write. Where such a market exists, competition in that market will inevitably drive the development of courses and books that claim to teach you as simple formula for writing a novel and getting it published. They will offer things like foolproof systems, short time frames, and simple steps.

All of this is inevitable. Where there is a market for advice and education, works like this will necessarily spring up to take advantage of that market. Even if no one who knows or cares anything about the subject would ever write such a book, someone who does not care will come along and write it because there is money to be made. Markets abhore a vacuum. Where there is a demand, products will be created to meet that demand.

Most of these books and courses will repeat exactly the same advice. Each of the foolproof systems they propose will be essentially the same foolproof system with different names on the steps and diagrams drawn differently. Some of this advice will be reasonable enough as far as it goes. Some of it may even help you figure out what went wrong when you get stuck.

But none of it will suffice to make you a successful novelist.

And much of it is so wildly simplistic or just downright wrong that it will do you far more harm than good if you try to follow it all.

A novelist is, at heart, a storyteller. They love stories. They read stories constantly. They tell stories. They pay attention to the nature of stories. They may read intelligent books that examine the nature of story. But more than all of this, they are attentive. They are attentive to life. They are attentive to the books they read. They are attentive to the impact that stories have on themselves and those around them.

You can't learn to write a novel the way you can learn to put together flat pack furniture or cook spaghetti bolognese. You have to learn by immersion with attention. Books and courses may be a element of that, but their greatest value may be that they introduce you to the company of other writers.

Original score: 12