This is a text on writing. The other posts are available in the Writing With Vane section. Short brief about me: I’m a writer who started writing in the late 80s and a I have few new books out. Subscribe for free below for the occasional newsletter.
The Delusional Comfort
Writing a novel is not an achievement. Finishing a draft is not an achievement. Hitting 100,000 words is not an achievement.
I call it the cult of the word count.
These milestones feel monumental because modern writing culture has spent decades inflating the value of effort while deliberately ignoring the prerequisite of ability. The emphasis on showing up and producing volume has created a pervasive, comforting delusion.
And that is precisely why the vast majority of aspiring writers stall out long before they ever reach a readership. It’s not because of a poor marketing strategy, or fierce competition, but because they were set up to fail from the very moment they were told to “just write a book.”
Let’s dismantle the five structural delusions that keep countless writers stuck in an endless cycle of ineffective labor.
1. The Fallacy of Volume
“Just Write the Novel” is Terrible Advice
The advice to “just write it” is seductive precisely because it validates the hardest part of the process: showing up. It creates a meritocracy of mileage. But this cult of word count is the enemy of craft, convincing writers that volume equals progress. It does not.
If a person were to smash the keys of a piano for an hour every morning, you would not mistake that noisy ritual for music. Yet, writing culture insists that the simple production of grammatical sentences makes one a storyteller. This mentality is comforting, it’s easy to measure, and it’s absolutely false. Drafting is merely the collection of raw material. It is the literary equivalent of mining ore. Until that ore is smelted, purified, and forged through the fire of revision and structural analysis, it is useless. Writers who mistake their rough draft for progress are simply digging a deeper hole for themselves.
2. The Structural Blindness
Writing is Impossible to Self-Evaluate
The human brain is an unreliable editor. When you read your own work, you do not see the execution; you see the intention. You hear the emotional beats that only exist in your head, and you subconsciously fill in the gaps and infer the connections your external reader will never perceive.
This blindness is structural and goes beyond simple typographical errors. It is a cognitive trap. You can be 50,000 words deep into a novel that never had a functioning narrative spine; a book where causality is broken, stakes are absent, and the core conflict is muddied—and you will not feel the failure until someone else points it out.
Your emotional attachment to the material acts as a highly effective anesthetic. You cannot “feel” your way out of a structural problem; you must learn to see it with a detached, clinical gaze. The moment a writer believes they are the best judge of their own work, their development ceases.
3. The Skill Gap
Being Able to Write Does Not Mean You Can Tell a Story
This is the most common assumption. It’s also the most lethal.
Because most professionals write emails, reports, academic papers, and blog posts daily, they assume that fiction is the same skillset, only extended.
It is not. Prose mechanics (syntax, vocabulary, grammar) are necessary but wholly insufficient for fiction. Storytelling requires architecture, a set of narrative competencies entirely separate from linguistic fluency: causality, escalating conflict, polarity shifts, threshold moments, narrative stakes, and pace control.
Without mastery of these architectural elements, your novel becomes a long, coherent document, not a story.
It has all the elements of a book (characters, setting, words) but lacks the operating system required to generate meaningful change for the reader. Most writers do not know this gap exists, discovering it only when the entire manuscript collapses under its own narrative weight during revision.
4. The Ego Trap
We Romanticize the Myth of Effortless Genius
The myth of the effortless genius—the writer who “just sat down and the whole thing poured out of them”, is the industry’s greatest lie.
It is a convenient marketing trope that flatters the aspiring writer’s ego and hides the staggering amount of unseen work.
Talent exists, but effortless genius does not. The difference between a masterwork and a meandering draft is engineering. Great stories are not exhaled; they are planned, dismantled, rebuilt, tested, and carved down with clinical precision.
Clinging to the myth of the “pour” allows the writer to avoid the difficult, messy, non-glamorous work of analysis and revision. When the book fails to resonate, the author can comfort themselves with the belief that they simply lacked the elusive, inborn talent, rather than admitting they lacked the necessary discipline and methodology.
5. The Gentle Failure
Bad Writing is Extremely Good at Looking Fine
This is the ultimate trap for stagnation. A bad painting is jarringly obvious. A poor singer hurts your ears. The feedback is immediate and painful.
But a bad story? It can be clean, grammatical, and well-edited on a sentence level. It can be perfectly pleasant to read. Even while it’s structurally dead.
This illusion of competency convinces the writer they are “almost there,” when in reality, they are operating in an entirely different domain from true storytellers. Their work has no obvious flaws, so they see no reason to fundamentally change their approach. This gentleness of failure makes it the hardest mode to escape, locking the writer into a comfortable plateau of mediocrity. The absence of a clear mistake is mistaken for the presence of skill.
The Wake-Up Call
The real reason writers fail to improve is not laziness, lack of talent, or imposter syndrome. It is that the process of just writing gives them just enough positive feedback to feel like they are doing it right, and just enough illusion to stop them from ever questioning why the story doesn’t work.
You mistake motion for mastery. Word count tricks you. Pretty sentences trick you. Emotional attachment tricks you. The absence of obvious flaws tricks you. All while the fundamental, structural problems of the narrative remain untouched, preserved like insects in amber.
Most writers don’t fail because they lack potential. They fail because they never learn to see their own work clearly, replacing the comfortable delusion with the painful but necessary truth. The truth is the only thing that will make you better.
Three of my books. Astral Leak, Norse Scriptures and The Lost Daughter. Available on Amazon.
A lot of good points here, although I disagree with #1. Sometimes you just need to write that failure of a first novel to get the ball rolling. I've trunked at least two novels. Assuming the writer is objective enough, he/she will learn a thing or two in the process.
This hit hard. Thank you for exposing the truth so brutally! A couple of thoughts come to mind. First, for many, getting 'better' doesn't necessarily mean improving the quality of one's prose. Instead, it is measured by audience size or compensation, which doesn't necessarily correlate.
Secondly, I think your piece does a fantastic job of summing up the challenges faced by every hobby writer. It's very difficult to source the kind of specific, valuable feedback about our work that you're identifying, without paying for it. Many of us are left with the impressions of family/friends (skewed) or any morsel that can be gleaned from the anonymous 'audience' that we manage to cobble together on public platforms. We bumble onward because there aren't many other options.