How Writers Learn and Grow

By Aimee Christian

This spring, I attended my first writing conference, and it was almost embarrassingly life-changing.

For a long time, I wondered how people just sit down and write a book and send it off to an agent and then get it published. Where do they find the discipline? How do they know it’s any good? How do they know when it’s done? And then wait, when we study craft, are we saying these writers did these things intentionally? They didn’t just sit down and dash off sheer bril...