Writing a book but avoiding going insane through frustration

By Dennis Mellersh

For a beginning writer, there is a genuine difficulty in learning both the art of writing and also at the same figuring out how to write a book.
 
So much so that it can be emotionally challenging – even overwhelming.

However, if you can accept a few realties about the profession of writing books, particularly fiction, your frustration will be much easier to deal with.

First of all you need to realize that difficulties in putting words to paper are not restricted to beginner writers; the problem plagues even experienced book authors. And not just when they were starting their careers, but also in their maturity as writers.

There is a great deal of knowledge you need to acquire involving the process and techniques of writing and it will not happen overnight; it will take considerable time, and is in fact a life-long learning process.

Writing and the ability to compose a manuscript for a book takes time to perfect. In fact, successful authors of books often comment that they never really “perfect” the art of writing; they constantly learn from their efforts and try to make the next book closer to their ideal.

Writing, for many book authors, can be an ongoing frustration because it is so difficult to translate into prose the vision, ideas, and images that you have in your head as a writer.

This creative conundrum is perhaps desirable. If a writer feels they have learned everything, it likely means they are stagnating and no longer growing. They might then start to write almost by formula or template.

The novelist James A. Michener spent years reading as many novels as he could in an effort to learn effective novel-writing techniques, and summing up this intellectual journey, he writes: “At long last, at the age of forty, when many writers have already retired, I felt that my apprenticeship was finished and I was ready to begin.”*

*James A. Michener, Literary Reflections, (paperback) A Tom Doherty Associates Book, New York, 1993