Things I Learned Writing My Novel #2--Writing is a skill that needs to be learned.

Would you trust your child to a surgeon who said, "I have no formal training as a doctor, but my mother told me I was special and could do anything I wanted to, so I got a scalpel and a set of scrubs and started walking around this hospital. Now, what seems to be the problem?"

If the answer is anything other than no, we need to talk.

Too many people start the writing journey thinking all they have to do is sit down, write, and publish whatever they produce. Once they've done that, the readers will flock to their masterpiece and declare them the next [fill in their favorite author]. There is a term for these writers: unpublished. Unless they self-publish; then its unread.

You've never heard of these writers because their work is usually crap. It's unedited, unprofessional, and unreadable. For the most part, thankfully, it inhabits the darker corners of Amazon that feature such wonderful genres as dinosaur erotica (yes, that is a real thing, you can look it up...on second thought, don't). Even when they publish in more traditional genres their work is just bad and does not get a readership beyond their mother and maybe their friends.

This is not to discourage anyone from writing. If you think you have a story to tell then by all means start writing. Writing at the very least can be a good hobby that can give you hours of enjoyment. But if you think you might want to publish the masterpiece bubbling in your brain, then you need to approach writing the way you've approached any other skill you wanted to master--with study, hard work, and a large dose of humility.

"But James, writing is art. It relies on inspiration, not skill."

Writing is art, like painting or composing a symphony. But the great artists in history spent years perfecting their craft, studying the fundamentals of light, color, perspective, proportion, before they produced masterpieces. Do you think Picasso woke up one morning and decided to invent Cubism? Similarly, you can't just wake up one morning, decide to write a book, and think you're going to get it right without having studied the fundamentals of the craft--grammar, plot, structure, character, to name a few.

The mistake I made until I wrote The Penitent Priest was thinking all I had to do was write. I did not take the time to study the fundamentals of how to write a story. I spent a lot of time reading about the writer's life, and you can benefit from the wisdom of other writers about their process, but much more valuable would have been a book or two on plot and structure. As a result, I got nowhere, I never finished a draft of anything. But when I decided in the wake of my cancer to finally write and complete a publishable book, I started with study. I listened to audio courses (thank you James Scott Bell), read books, found great resources on YouTube by authors, and incorporated what I learned into my writing the first draft. By the time I finished the first draft I actually thought I knew what I was doing. To edit, I studied editing and incorporated those lessons to work on drafts 2 and 3. I learned about beta readers, ARC reviewers, cover design. The publishing process was made a lot easier because I had actually researched how to publish and market a self-published book. Because of the conscious attempt I made to learn the craft of writing and publishing, The Penitent Priest was not yet another unpublished dumpster fire.

So before you start to write that story, read or listen to a book or two on the craft of writing. You'll find the entire process a lot easier, and who knows, you might even be able to get someone other than your mother to buy it!.