Hard writing isn't bad writing
Or, just because you've found your "magical cookies" doesn't mean the writing will always be easy
Hi, I’m Susan Dennard, a New York Times bestseller and the long-time (over?)sharer of radically transparent writing and publishing advice. If you want access to all 94 posts I’ve written for the Misfits & Daydreamers Substack, you can start a free 7-day trial right here!
1. Latest News from the Desk of Sooz
It’s been a pretty good month since my last update, if busy with life stuff and Cricket’s ongoing asthma. Witchlight is going great, though—and when the writing is smooth, the rest of my life trends happy. I’ll admit I was stuck for a few weeks, which really sent me into a despairing emotional spiral. But I Did The Thing and asked for outside help, and it made a huge difference! Twice I got miserably stuck, and twice friends came to the rescue.
And in other news, Baldur’s Gate 3 is incredible. Truly. I haven’t played a game that hooked me this much since Deathloop. And my god, that score! I have listened to this piece and this piece on repeat as I draft.
2. Writing Prompts
STORY PROMPT ✍️
A lonely teen finds companionship at the local comic shop, but there’s something weird happening in the basement…
JOURNALING ✍️
Look back at the beginning of the year, when you were hopeful and bright-eyed and setting goals for the year. How have you done? This might be painful, or it might be freeing. Sometimes, letting go of goals is the best thing we can do. And sometimes, just the general trend of a change can transform our lives even if we don’t reach the specific goal.
3. For the DenNerds
I’ve been updating more often over on the Worlds of Susan Dennard, so go check that out if you’d like to see the latest sneak peeks and cover reveals. We’re barely two months out from The Hunting Moon hitting stores in the US and UK (😱), so please consider supporting me with a pre-order.
And if you want to know why pre-orders are so important to authors—and why we keep begging for them—then read this very long, very detailed post I did with my agent last year.
3. For the Daydreamers
I have a great AMA question to answer for you all that ties together with my last newsletter on magical cookies. @Janice asks:
Can you talk about some of your favorite scenes to write between The Luminaries and The Witchlands? Were they cookie scenes, or did some favorites sneak up and surprise you?
I love this question for a few reasons, but the main reason is that it allows me to expand on one element of cookies that I’ve failed to convey in the past: the idea that if you’re doing cookies right, the words will come out effortlessly.
One of the things I’ve even said in the past is that “if you’re bored writing it, the reader will be bored reading it.” But that’s not actually true, is it?
It’s certainly not true for me, and I regret having ever written that phrase or perpetuated it! Because sometimes words are hard and agonizing, and sometimes I am bored as I try to figure out my Right Story. Yet that doesn’t mean that what I’ve written is automatically bad.
Nor does it mean my cookies are wrong.
My favorite scene to write in the first Luminaries book was honestly the entire book. I don’t know if it was because I needed an escape during my kiddo’s naps time or just wanted something “easy” to write to give me a breather from the Witchlands, but that whole book was a cookie.
Part of the reason why it was so “easy” to write was that I was able to enter each scene, each writing session and ask myself, What would make me happy to write today? Sometimes that meant more #UghJay and Winnie interactions, sometimes it meat Winnie bonding with her brother, sometimes it meant a makeover scene with her new best friends. I truly followed my id with that book, and it was a joy.
In other words, I could easily find cookies and follow them.
The sequel though…🥲
Don’t get me wrong, I had plenty of cookies in The Hunting Moon.1 But as happens to me with sequels, I was suddenly forced to reckon with all the pantsing I’d done in book one, and sigh. I could no longer fly free! I had to address all the plot points introduced earlier.
I would be lying if I said writing the second book was easy. Or effortless. Or overflowing with cookies like the first book. And because it was not—because I kept backtracking, cutting, and rewriting in pursuit of the Right Story—I kept assuming I was “doing it wrong.” I interpreted the struggle as a sign I wasn’t a good writer. The first book was so easy! It was so fun! The challenge and discomfort now must mean I’m doing it wrong.
Did it matter that I had experienced this same problem with every sequel I’d ever written? No. I kept comparing The Hunting Moon to The Luminaries instead of comparing it to Bloodwitch or A Darkness Strange & Lovely.
Looking back, I can now see that Truthwitch was also one big cookie—and with a few Really Yummy Chocolate Chunks tossed in2, but then Windwitch came along and I had to deal with all the plotting seeds I’d planted. Each book got progressively more challenging after that, and Witchlight is proving no different!
Cue: tears and despair.
Yet, as mentioned, I have this unhealthy, unhelpful tendency to compare apples to oranges instead of oranges to oranges. I compare The Hunting Moon to The Luminaries. I compare Witchlight to the finished and polished version of Witchshadow.
This is a trap I see other authors also fall into all the time. (Survival check: critical fail.3) The book we just finished, which is all shiny and edited, is what we compare our slogging draft to. We look back with fondness at how easy the last book was, our brains smoothing off the edges and erasing the despair that plagued us six, eight, twelve months ago.
Honestly, it was only after working with Becca Syme that I realized I was doing this to myself. First books and standalone will always be free and easy for me. It’s how my brain is wired. Sequels will always be hard—but that does not mean I’m doing them wrong. It does not mean my cookies are wrong. It just means sequels are harder to write for me and will take longer.
Which is okay. It is how I am mentally wired, and fighting that truth for the 13 years I’ve been a professional author has not led me anywhere happy.
Long story short: I can’t compare the book I’m working on today to the smoothed-out memory of what came before. And I definitely can’t compare the challenges I face with a sequel to the ease I find with first books.
And I cannot assume that a challenge means the words on the page are bad.
Look, not every scene—EVEN WHEN IT IS A HUGE COOKIE—will be easy to write. The words will not always pour forth in a geyser of creative potential. In fact, there are only a few moments I can recall in my twelve years of publishing books where I felt I was channeling something outside myself.
In case you want to know, they were:
The climax to Strange & Ever After
The ball and lighthouse sequence in Truthwitch.
The dam sequence in Witchlight.
Aeduan’s ending of sequence in Bloodwitch.
Most of The Luminaries.
And that’s it, y’all. Notice what’s not on there? The entirety of Witchshadow. That doesn’t mean there weren’t scenes I loved and enjoyed writing in Witchshadow, but because of years of IVF and then a traumatic childbirth, I was not in an emotional or physical state to ever reach flow.
And so far, Witchlight has yet to give me any sustained moments of explosive, gushing word vomit either—even though most of this book is ONE GIANT COOKIE.
I exist in a state of constant interruptions. Especially since Cricket’s asthma diagnosis means everyday is a giant question mark. Will she go to school today? Or will she need to stay home and have breathing treatments? Or was she maybe up all night coughing because of her asthma so I barely slept?
How on earth can I expect to reach a true, explosive flow state when I work in spurts instead of long, uninterrupted hours like before?
And even if I have long, uninterrupted hours, I do not exist in a vacuum. If life feels unsteady, the words do too.
But that doesn’t mean what I do manage to write is bad.
In fact, I think Wtichshadow is the most accomplished book I’ve ever written from a craft perspective. I am beyond proud of what I pulled off in that book, and reading it—especially the final act—is a gut punch of emotions for me. Cookie after cookie, even if actually getting those cookies on the page was really, really hard.
The challenge isn’t visible now! You the reader can’t see the struggle I went through!
In other words: you can be pretty much any emotional state, and NO, that doesn’t have to transfer to the reader.
That’s why we have editing and critique partners and eleventh drafts: so that any slog we do experience as we craft can get smoothed away.4
So there you have it. Cookies are still an incredibly valuable tool, and I use them every day the I work and in every project I write.
But cookies don’t eliminate challenge, and a challenge doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong.
Hard writing isn’t bad writing.
In fact, I think those of us who can sit with our discomfort the longest—those of us who don’t get turned off by the challenges and frustrations, but rather bask in it like the really unpleasant grease bath that it is…
Well, we’re the ones who will last the longest in this business and in this art.
Now off you go. Face the page, friends. It might be hard today, but that doesn’t make it wrong. 😘
5. Help the Mighty Pens raise money for We Need Diverse Books!
I am so thrilled to share that the Mighty Pens—the fundraising initiative I’m a part of every November for NaNoWriMo—is partnering with We Need Diverse Books this year!
Every year, we help writers write 50,000 words and we raise money for a cause close to our heart. This year, we’re fundraising to book bans because readers deserve to see themselves in books, just as writers deserve to write themselves into them!
We’d love to have writers join us this November to write money and raise funds for WNDB! You can sign up here—or just learn more about what we do!
We’re also looking for volunteers to help us run things behind the scenes. Responsibilities include things like hosting writer sprints or answering emails or brainstorming fun community ideas. Volunteer here!
Lastly, we’re looking for prize donations from authors, agents, editors, and anyone else in the publishing world who might have something to give! Items like chapter critiques, query critiques, Q&A phone calls, signed books—anything! These items are then used to entice our participants to raise money for WDNB. You can donate your prizes here!
The more we write, the more we raise! 💪
Thanks for reading, friends! I’ll be back soon with more writerly goodness and love!
💚 - Sooz
P.S. Starfield is out today!! Are any of you playing? I need to beat BG3 first…then I am allowed to get Starfield. I’d love to know what you all are thinking if you dive in this weekend!
There’s one scene in the forest about halfway through that I love so much. It involves will-o-wisps, but it was a cookie that only showed up in revisions!
The lighthouse scene, the dance scene, the scene with Aeduan fighting Evrane, just to name a few…
I’ve been playing too much BG3, okay? And man does it make me hungry to DM a tabletop session again.
Much like my memories of how hard the last book was, lol.
Oh my gosh, do I need this post today. Writing has been so, so hard lately. I can't remember how it used to be! This has reinvigorated me 💙
I hope you enjoy Starfield!!!
Thank you, thank you! It's SUCH a good reminder. It's not even news, but we just need to keep hearing it over and over. Margaret Rogerson wrote in the afterword to Vespertine that she was sometimes so deep in depression she could barely lift her head off the pillow, yet she can't tell the difference now between those scenes and the ones she wrote when she was feeling better.
Maggie Stiefvater said that the more she knows about craft, the less able she is to get into flow *while writing*, because she's thinking so hard about the words. The act of writing feels less and less like the act of reading (you don't feel the same writing the scene as the reader will reading it) but that's ok, because she can still have the flow when reading.
It's all true. Now to go stare at the words some more.