Writing Is Harder Than It Looks

Reflections from The Turtle’s Diary* Image by: Adobe Express

Writing Is Harder Than It Looks

I’ve been a little quiet these last several days because I’ve been buried inside a novel.

Or a book.

Or whatever category it falls into when you spend six years building a murder mystery where the villain is revealed in the opening scenes. Technically, I’m not even sure that still qualifies as a mystery at that point, but I’ve grown attached to calling it one, so the title survives mostly out of stubbornness.

The truth is, I completely underestimated almost everything about writing fiction.

Not the plot itself. Oddly enough, the plot is the easy part. People always imagine writers sitting around trying to invent dramatic twists or shocking reveals, but that’s rarely what slows you down. The hard part is remembering that fictional people still need somewhere to wash their clothes.

Seriously.

You can spend hours refining an emotionally devastating conversation only to suddenly realize four chapters later that your main character has no car, no laundry access, no nearby pharmacy, and somehow appears to own an endless supply of clean shirts despite living in a rented boarding house with construction workers and one barely functioning bathroom down the hall.

Then you have to stop everything and figure out how reality works again.

That’s writing.

When I first started blogging years ago, my writing looked very different from what it does now. Back then, Daniel had just been diagnosed with cancer, and much of what I wrote came from anger, exhaustion, fear, and the strange helplessness that follows you through hospitals and treatment schedules. The blog became a pressure valve more than anything else. I vented. A lot.

After Daniel died, the writing shifted. The anger softened into opinion pieces, informational articles, and commentary aimed more toward the naturist community itself. I began writing more about etiquette, perception, aging, body image, social behavior, and all the strange little unspoken things people notice but rarely discuss. Those are still the kinds of blog pieces I like to write today.

Even then, however, my writing style still carried years of business and academic habits inside it. Most of my professional background involved structured communication, research-heavy formatting, presentations, analysis, and thesis-style writing. State the point. Support the point. Move to the next point.

Fiction doesn’t work that way.

Or at least good fiction doesn’t.

You don’t simply write:

“She walked into the room.”

You have to decide what the room smells like.

You have to notice the stained wallpaper near the ceiling. The hum of an overworked air conditioner. Whether the lampshade leans slightly crooked because somebody repaired it years ago and never quite fixed it properly. Whether the floor creaks near the doorway. Whether the character notices these things because she’s observant or because nervous people catalogue environments instinctively.

Then the conversations start.

And suddenly you realize people in novels cannot talk like people writing business memos.

Dialogue has rhythm. Personality. Interruption. Hesitation. Humor that sometimes lands badly. People speak around truths as often as they speak directly into them. Some characters ramble. Others answer questions without actually answering them at all. Some become quieter exactly when the scene requires honesty most.

Learning that has probably taken me longer than plotting the murders.

I follow a lot of authors online, and I’m always jealous when they proudly announce they wrote 500 or 1,000 words that day. I can write 500 words in an afternoon, and then I spend the next three days shuffling half of them around because something suddenly stops making sense. The character has no way to get to work. The pharmacy is too close to town. The resort somehow moved three miles overnight. Or I forgot entirely that human beings eventually need clean underwear.

The strangest part is discovering how much fiction depends on invisible details. Readers may never consciously notice whether a resort is two blocks outside town or two miles outside town — unless you get it wrong. Then suddenly the entire story feels artificial without anyone fully understanding why.

That has happened to me repeatedly while writing this novel.

I’ll spend days refining a chapter only to realize I accidentally made the setting feel like coastal Maryland in one scene and southern Georgia in another. Or I’ll discover that I’ve unintentionally turned a quiet upscale retreat into a sprawling Las Vegas nudist compound simply because I described the parking lot badly three chapters earlier.

Once you notice the mistake, you can’t unsee it.

So back you go.

Again.

And that may be the most surprising thing I’ve learned about writing fiction: very little of it moves in a straight line. You outline. You plan. You convince yourself you’ve finally solved the architecture of the story. Then somewhere around chapter six you suddenly remember your main character still needs hormone prescriptions refilled and has no transportation to reach the pharmacy without attracting attention in a conservative little coastal town.

Now congratulations — you have a new subplot.

We love to romanticize a writer's creativity. Candlelight. Typewriters. Inspiration arriving like lightning from the heavens.

In reality, much of writing is staring at a paragraph thinking:

Wait… where exactly is this woman supposed to do laundry?

* The Turtle’s Diary is a collection of thoughts, insights, and stories based on true-life experiences – all born from the misguided trust in others.

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