The hardest part about writing a book has nothing to do with writing a book

There are many bucket lists that declare that before that person dies, they would like to write a book. Just you wait for the day they have enough time, have enough energy, or when they retire. Writing a book is a capstone project to life for many a person. And it’s no wonder! Writing a book is a fierce undertaking. It’s hundreds of pages, tens of thousands of words. Writing a book is hard work.

But the hardest part about writing a book has nothing to do with writing a book.

It’s a fact (okay, opinion) that sounds absolutely impossible. Writing a book is hard! How is there something harder about writing a book than, you know, writing the dang book? Never mind writing a cohesive story that makes some logical sense, which, by the way, is not what I’m thinking of either. Creating characters is hard. Coming up with an idea is hard. Building a story outline is hard. Dialogue, story arcs, finding the time, these are all very, very hard parts of writing books.

But the hardest thing about writing a book is that in writing a book, you also have to face the emotional moments your characters face.

Maybe that sounds fake. Especially if you’ve never tried writing a book before, or maybe if you’ve written a book with more of an action-orientation. I mean, sure, writing emotional stuff is hard but no harder than writing a novel of 80,000 words, right? Or the world building that goes into a fantasy novel? (If you’ve read Lord of the Rings, you know what I mean.) And I absolutely don’t mean to understate how hard every part of writing a book can be. I wouldn’t say writing a book is easy in any capacity (if it was, everyone would write a book!). I’ve written enough books that I’ve basically lost count and even I will not pretend for so much as an instant that any part of writing those books was easy.

So why do I say that the hardest part of writing a book are the emotional experiences your characters face? It’s because when my characters face emotional turmoil, I have to face it too.

Have you ever screamed at a TV screen when your favorite character died? Cried tears of joy when your OTP FINALLY KISSED ALREADY? Then you are certainly familiar with how a fictional story can throw you straight into an emotional blender and crank that bad boy up to HIGH. The thing is writing those experiences turns the knob up to eleven. And if you’re writing in first person, I’m pretty sure you just go ahead and install the number twelve on that dial.

As you write, you’re doing more than telling a story. You are falling into the head of another person entirely, thinking their thoughts rather than your own. You wake up hours later, back in your own skin, blinking at the fact that there is more than the blue light of your laptop screen in the world. And while you’re in the heads of your characters, you feel what they’re feeling as well. You slip into their skin, try on their clothes, and experience their problems the way they do.

What makes this experience all the more powerful is when you realize that fictional worlds are so often informed by our actual lives. Which means the emotions your characters are facing are sometimes fictionalized versions of emotions you are already facing in your real life. And now the problem you couldn’t solve in your real life?

Well, you’ve got to solve it in your book.

The idea for this blog post came to me when I was actually writing one of my own books. Without going into too much detail, my protagonist was facing an emotionally challenging situation in which she considered her own feelings of imperfection and inferiority. Which only made me think about how I often struggle with the same sorts of feelings.

I had to walk away from the computer for a little bit. My giggle morphed into a groan real quick.

And then there was my undergraduate honors thesis. (Which you can read right here, if you want *hint, hint*) And it’s a HEAVY piece of work. For my thesis, I wrote an alternate universe YA origin story for Peter Pan (no, really). But one of the biggest themes I undertook in the book was mental health in a world in which mental illness was extremely taboo. Therefore, my protagonist battled depression throughout the novel. At a time when I was fairly confident I had an undiagnosed mental illness that I was too afraid to get diagnosed. Which, yup, recipe for COMPLICATED EMOTIONS.

There’s a moment in the story in which the protagonist considers these feelings and what they mean for her life. How tired she is in facing her depression. How she wants a break. How she wants to be someone else for a little while.

And when I wrote the last line of that section, I nearly burst into tears in the middle of the very public basement of the student center at college so I snapped my laptop closed and walked back to my dorm where I could cry in peace.

There was a nugget of truth in those words that I could not bear to say for myself, even though I felt those feelings. Until I put them in my protagonist’s words, I wasn’t brave enough to face those feelings. But in a novel, I was faced with them in a way I could begin to digest.

Writing a book is more than words on a page, more than a wild adventure in which your greatest dreams and darkest nightmares come true. They’re not all ghosts and hauntings or grand balls and love affairs or coming of age and awkward first dates. Sometimes, they are the tiniest whispers slipping through your mind until you accidentally allow them to spill out on the page.

And those tiny, inconspicuous thoughts that your writing forces you to face, that’s harder than the writing of hundreds of thousands of words on a page.