Welcome To Ellen Wrote A Book: Where We Talk Writing And Self-Publishing
You’ll see writing advice and self-publishing tips land in your inbox daily. That doesn’t mean they all need your attention.
Read the ones that meet you where you are. The rest will still be here when you need them.
Nearly ten years of writing professionally will teach you things about the craft that no course covers or writing community tends to say out loud.
Some of what I know came from reading. Some came from editors whose feedback landed badly and turned out to be right.
Most of it came from doing the work badly enough and for long enough that the lessons eventually stopped needing to be taught.
These are the ten pieces of advice I keep coming back to. Not the most comforting advice, I must admit, but the most useful.
I hope it helps.
1. Finish What You’re Writing
Abandoned projects teach you almost nothing.
The manuscript you left at 40,000 words, the short story collection you got four pieces into, the article you drafted and never published; they feel like progress while you are working on them and leave almost nothing behind when you walk away.
Finished work teaches you everything, including what not to do next time.
The only way to understand what a complete piece of writing requires of you is to take something all the way through to the end, including the parts that feel wrong and the parts that resist you.
Finishing badly is more instructive than abandoning altogether.
2. The Reader Owes You Nothing
Their attention is a gift, not an obligation.
They did not ask you to write the piece.
They did not promise to read it carefully, charitably, or even to the end.
We need to remember they’re giving you something genuinely valuable when they choose to spend time with your work. And the appropriate response to that is to make the work worth their time, not to expect the credit for having written it at all.
This is a harder attitude to maintain than it sounds.
It means the work must justify itself on its own terms, without the reader being asked to “pay you” for the effort that went into it.
3. Confusion In The Reader Is Always The Writer’s Fault
Never blame the audience for not understanding.
If a reader is confused, the writing created the confusion, and the writing is the only place the problem can be fixed.
This one is uncomfortable because it removes every available excuse. You cannot blame the complexity of the subject matter, or the reader’s lack of patience, or the limitations of the form.
If someone reads your work and comes away unclear about what you were saying, that is information about the writing, and the only productive response to it is to go back and make it clearer.
4. Volume Is The Only Honest Teacher
You cannot think your way to being a better writer.
You cannot read your way there, or plan your way there, or spend enough time in writing communities discussing the craft to substitute for the thing itself.
You write your way there, and the writing has to be actual writing, words produced and finished and sent out into the world, not drafts that sit in a folder waiting to be good enough.
The writers who improve are the ones who write a lot.
That is not meant to be an inspiring insight, by the way. It is just true, and it is worth saying plainly because the writing advice industry sells a great deal of content that implies there is a shortcut.
5. Editing Is Not Fixing Bad Writing. It’s Finding The Real Piece Inside The Draft.
Most of what you cut from a draft was necessary to write and unnecessary to keep.
The first version of almost anything is the writer working out what they are trying to say. The edited version is what they were trying to say, with the working-out removed.
This reframes editing from a corrective process, something you do because the draft was wrong, into a clarifying one, something you do because the draft was exploratory and the piece inside it now needs to be found.
Both framings lead to the same place.
However, the second one is considerably less demoralising.
6. The Work Does Not Care How You Feel About It
There will be mornings when writing feels impossible and mornings when it feels inevitable, and the work produced on both kinds of mornings is often indistinguishable.
The feeling is not a reliable signal.
It does not tell you whether the session will be productive or whether the output will be any good.
Sit down anyway.
Writing discipline is not about writing when you feel like it. It is about writing when you don’t, consistently enough that the work gets done, regardless of what state you arrive in.
The feeling tends to follow the action rather than precede it, and waiting for the right feeling before starting is one of the most effective ways never to start at all.
7. Nobody Can Tell You What Your Voice Sounds Like From The Outside
Voice is not something you find by reading about it, being told you have it, or workshopping it with other writers.
You find it by writing until the pretending stops and the version of yourself you perform on the page starts to give way to something more specific and less managed.
This takes longer than anyone wants it to. It also can’t be rushed by thinking about it harder.
The only way through is writing enough that the performance becomes unsustainable and something more real takes over.
8. A Finished Piece That Is Imperfect Beats A Perfect Piece That Doesn’t Exist
The writers who ship imperfect work consistently build something over time.
The writers who wait until the work is ready, genuinely ready, the way they mean it when they say it, tend to produce very little and call it high standards.
Finishing and publishing something you are not entirely sure about is not a compromise. It is the practice.
The piece you are not certain about is teaching you things the piece you kept polishing indefinitely never could, because the piece you kept polishing never had to exist in the world and be responded to.
9. Write For One Person
A specific, real reader in mind produces better work than writing for everyone and hoping to reach someone.
When you write for everyone, the writing tends to smooth itself into something inoffensive and unmemorable, because the attempt to include all possible readers destroys everything that might connect strongly with any particular one.
The reader you write for does not have to be the only reader.
In practice, the more specifically you write for one person, the more other people recognise themselves in it.
Specificity is what creates connection. It’s what they call “niching down”.
10. The Market Delivered The Feedback The Community Wouldn’t
The people who care about you (loved ones, friends will protect you from the truth about your work because they care about you more than they care about the work.
That is not a failing on their part.
It is just the nature of the relationship.
The market does not care about you at all, which makes it a considerably more honest respondent.
When work fails commercially, or fails to find readers, or generates the kind of nothing that tells you something without saying anything, that silence is information.
It is harder to receive than a kind word from someone who loves you, but it’s considerably more useful.
For Writers Building A Writing Career
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Some very good advice here. Especially point 2.
Great insights on manuscript formatting! Proper interior layout and trim sizes make a huge difference in how professional a book looks on Amazon KDP. At KM Kreation, we always emphasize checking prepress specs early to avoid print delays. Thanks for sharing these tips!