Top 8 Lessons I’ve Learned as a Writer in 16 Years

Today, I want to take a moment to talk about eight of the lessons I’ve learned over my years of being a writer. Particularly, I want to share some of the the biggerepiphanies and moments that have impacted me in a way that’s changed my life. These are lessons that have been meaningful on a deep level and that I think are valuable to hear about and perhaps recognize as part of your writing journey as well.

Lesson #1: Story Structure Is Amazing

This is something I learned relatively early on in my writing journey. Obviously, it completely changed my life since I’ve built a career around teaching story theory and story structure!

When I first encountered story structure, I’d written four or five novels without really knowing anything about writing. I hadn’t read any how-to books or encountered any ideas from other people. My stories up to that point were simply ones that came from my own heart and my own imagination and the osmosis from being a lifelong reader. But I didn’t have any concept that there were systems through which you could view writing and storytelling.

I remember when I first learned about structure, my first thought was, This is amazing! This is incredible! It absolutely just made sense. I could immediately see how plot structure was reflected in so many of the stories that I read and watched and loved.

My second thought was, Oh, darn, I’ve written all these books. I’ve published a couple at this point, and I didn’t know anything about structure. So they’re probably a mess.

And the most exciting thing was the moment when I went to my bookshelf and pulled out a couple of my books that were already published. I started flipping through the pages to get to the estimated timing points of say the First Plot Point or the Midpoint or the beginning of the Third Act. And it was amazing! The structure was there, even though I hadn’t consciously had any understanding of the terms or the timing or any of it. I was already intuitively and instinctively creating stories around this principle.

That just blew my mind. Honestly, that completely changed the trajectory of my life, not just because it allowed me to become passionate about teaching story structure and story theory, but also because it changed my view of how the world worked and how story was a reflection of life.

So my first lesson was, again, story structure is not just important, but amazing. I think that can be something writers miss because they’re so focused on the rules and “the way to do it” rather than asking, “Why? Why is this important?”

For me, digging into the why has been one of the greatest joys and pleasures of my life, not just as a writer, but just generally.

Lesson #2: Character Arcs Will Change Your Life

After discovering story structure and how that completely impacted my whole view of story, the next step was the character arcs. The lesson here for me was that character arcs will change your life.

As I started digging into character arcs, where that really solidified for me was when Writer’s Digest asked me to collaborate on a short series of what they called Annotated Classics. They would take classic novels and have someone go through from a writing perspective and comment on what the author was doing and sometimes the historical pertinence and things like that. They asked me to work on Jane Eyre. That book is still in print, if you’re interested.

In studying Jane Eyre for this project—just going through looking at the story structure and what Charlotte Bronte did with it, I began to see and understand how character arc worked on a deeper level. I could see how the character evolves from a Lie or a limited perspective that they believe into a more expanded perspective representing the story’s thematic Truth. I recognized how the beats of this character evolution interacted with story structure.

Writing that book completely changed my life. I never looked at character arc the same way. I would go on, of course, to write my book Creating Character Arcs. Once again, not only was that exciting from a writing perspective—being able to get under the hood and see how character arc worked at a story level—it also was one of those things that changed my life because again, we have this partnership and this reflection between life and story.

In being able to understand how character arc worked, it also completely changed how I looked at transformation within my own life. I began to be able to recognize the character arcs I was taking. I could see, Oh, this is the Lie I’m believing. And this is what I’m overcoming. And maybe I’m on a Disillusionment Arc over here and maybe I’m on a Flat Arc over here.

That has been a useful and empowering way to view my own life. We hear this thing about “being the hero of your own life.” As a writer, being able to take all of these tools and techniques we use in enhancing our stories and our characters and progressing to seeing our own lives through that lens is just an incredible gift.

And then, of course, we get to mine all that life experience and bring it back and put it into our stories with a deeper understanding of what our characters are going through. We have a lived experience of the steps of transformation .

Lesson #3: Define Your Own Idea of Success

The third lesson is more about the writing life than writing techniques. This lesson is “define your own idea of success.” Why are you doing this?

For me—and I think for many writers who want to or are able to make the transition into writing full-time—it’s important to understand what your goals are and to be in touch with your own values. Why?

Number one, there’s a lot of resistance in this lifestyle. It’s an uphill climb in many ways. There will be lots of nos. There will be lots of times where you’re querying agents or whatever, when you’ll be rejected and you won’t be able to gain entry into traditional publishing. On the flipside, if you’re self-publishing, it’s easy enough to put your book out there, but it’s much harder to actually sell copies.

The point is that the writing life can be very discouraging. It can feel like you’re not making any traction if you’re putting all of your emphasis on questions such as: How many books am I selling? How much money am I making?

Now, of course, all of that is important. I’m able to do this full-time, and I’m incredibly grateful for that. But it’s been a long road to get where I’m at. Particularly in the beginning, you don’t have a lot to show for what you’re doing. It might be other people are judging you for different choices that you’re making, such as choosing to self-publish. That was a big thing when I was first starting out. Self-publishing wasn’t as legit as it is now, and there was a lot of judgment about choosing to go that route. Self-publishing automatically made you less of a writer.

No matter how successful you are at any given point, there’s always somebody who’s more successful, somebody who’s making more money selling more books, having bigger book signings or winning more awards or whatever. You look at their writing and it’s amazing. You think, I would like to write like this.

Writing in itself is such a vulnerable act. More than that, it’s very hard to judge its worth. There is no hard and fast rule for saying what measures up and what doesn’t. There’s no level of books you can sell that says you’ve made it. There’s no guidelines that somebody can apply to your story and say, “This is a perfect story.”

There’s always something that has you asking, “Am I measuring up? Is it good enough?” And because there’s so much rejection involved and so much uncertainty about how you’re able to measure your success, something I had to learn early on in order to survive in the business was to define my success by my own terms. I had to learn to dig deep down deep inside of myself and ask, “Why am I doing what I’m doing? Is it to sell X amount of books? Is it to make X amount of money? Is it to win a particular award? Is it to be traditionally published?” I had to get really real with myself about the choices I was making and why. I had to learn to identify where I was making choices that weren’t actually in alignment with my own values and desires, but were instead based on some projected ideal “out there” that seemed to be what everybody else would respect as an established writer.

Being able to do that is a process. It’s something I refine all the time in my life. Certainly, as my career has progressed and gotten more stable to the point I have seen a certain measure of success, it has gotten easier to deal with some of the demons of doubt. But when things aren’t going the way I want them to, being able to come back to this lodestone question of “Why am I doing this? What is my guiding principle? What is underlying it?”—that has always been helpful to me in measuring the effort I’m putting in and asking, “Is it worth it? Is the stress worth it?” Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t. It totally depends on my value system.

I also think you have to have the ability to advance those goals. They need to be realistic in the beginning. If your goal is to be a New York Times best-seller, then that’s probably not going to be something that’s going to happen in the first year. So you set smaller goals. It’s not so much about whether or not you’re reaching your goals as whether or not you are in alignment with why you’re doing what you’re doing. Are you writing for the love of it? Are you writing because you have something to say? Or are you writing because you believe stories are important? Are you writing because you believe it’s important for you to tell this story?

I used to say that I would write stories even if I knew no one would ever read them. And that’s still true. (In fact, sometimes it’s easier to write stories if no one’s going to read them!) That was something that was always a guiding principle for me. I would tell myself, “I’m not doing this to be read.” That’s not true for everyone, and that’s fine. But for me, being able to always come back to that and to remember that I’m doing this for my own reasons for—because I have something to say, because the stories want out—was always really helpful. When there was judgment or there was criticism or there was just some amazing writer I was comparing myself to, I could come back to that and just remember, “No, I’m doing me.”

Particularly, when you’re going to do this for the long haul, you have to have some kind of foundation like that to keep you on track with where you’re at and where you’re going.

Lesson #4: Writer’s Block Is Part of the Process

If you have been following me for any length of time, then you know that starting around 2018, I went through a massive bout of writer’s block that lasted several years. It coincided with a difficult time in my life. There were just a lot of stressful things going on and my fiction writing fell apart for me for a while.

It was very disconcerting. This had been such a huge part of my identity up to that point, and then suddenly I couldn’t write. I was questioning my value system. “Do I want to keep doing this?”

What I’ve learned as I’ve worked through this process and have been able to overcome that block and return to writing fiction is that I think we stigmatize writer’s block. We make it sound like it’s something that should never happen. Certainly, it can become something that’s undesirable, but a lot of that is because we don’t recognize the ebb and flow of creativity.

Rest periods are important. They’re part of the process. But if you are writing full time, there’s this pressure to write constantly—to produce book after book after book after book. Now maybe that’s your natural rhythm and that’s great, but for most of us—for me—that’s not true. At the end, because I did push really hard for many years, the well emptied out and I didn’t have the creative juice to come up with another story.

Because of my lifestyle up until that point, my writer’s blog was extreme. But if we need to realize that being a writer doesn’t mean you always have to be writing. That’s something people ask me all the time, “Do I have to write every day to be a writer?” And my answer is, “Absolutely not.” You can write two weeks out of a year, and if you’re really into it and what you’re producing is really important to you, of course, you’re a writer. But if you are a professional writer, it’s a job, and you have to take some time off.

More than that, creativity is something that rises up from the subconscious. It’s not something we necessarily have conscious control over. Therefore, we have to give it space to come to us. We have to cultivate lifestyles that allow for it to really thrive and grow.

This has been a huge lesson for me because I naturally have a personality that tends toward workaholicism. It’s been a huge lesson for me to recognize that down periods of creativity are important; that they are part of the cycle; that creative cycles are necessarily like the cycle of the seasons. We have to come down into winter and be willing to take time and space without constantly trying to harness our creativity as if it’s an endless resource, rather than recognizing it as a gift and a partner and something that needs to be nourished and taken care of.

Lesson #5: Take Care of Your Creative Health

If you have ever gone through an extensive period of creative burnout, then you know it’s brutal. It’s so difficult and scary and sad because, number one, creativity is a life force and to lose connection with that is very devastating on a purely primal level.

Second, to whatever degree “I am a writer” is a major identity for you, then losing connection with that and being in a place where you wonder if you’re ever going to get it back is scary. When you’re there, you don’t know who you are anymore. That in itself, for me anyway, was an extremely valuable process. I learned so much about myself and experienced so many ego deaths. Ultimately it was full of richness and blessing, but it’s still very scary and very difficult.

Finally, if you make your money doing this as this is your livelihood, then if you’d get disconnected from your creativity and your ability to be productive with that, that’s endangering your very survival at a certain level. And that is definitely scary.

We hear so much these days about taking care of your mental health, and I think more and more we’re also hearing about taking care of your emotional health as part and parcel of that. But another nuance is starting to think more consciously about taking care of our creative health. However you may be expressing your creativity—storytelling, in this context—you have to take care of that. You have to cultivate a lifestyle and an awareness that allows that to thrive.

That looks a little different for everybody. Honestly, just having good habits in general is a good place to start. Taking care of your physical health and your mental health and your emotional health clears your energy. It clears the space in your life to allow that creativity to emerge.

You can think of creativity as giving birth. It’s a very vulnerable act, and you don’t do it out in the open where there’s danger and all kinds of stuff happening. In the olden days, you’d go to a cave, someplace private, probably with people guarding the entrance. Creating a story or a piece of art is kind of like that. The story doesn’t want to come out if it doesn’t feel safe.

So if there’s all this stuff going on in our brains—stress and distraction and all of that—it’s hard to birth something. It’s hard to get into that space where you can birth the story idea and put in the work to, not just type out the words, but to channel it up from your own deep creativity.

For me, particularly in these years since my writer’s block, it’s been a huge lesson and a huge process of learning how to cultivate a creative life. It’s an ongoing thing. I still enjoy being productive and love doing the work aspects of my job and showing up for that, but I also have learned to put so much more emphasis and care into taking care of myself in service to the creativity.

Something I’ve learned about burnout is not so much that it happens because “the well is empty,” as because “the well is clogged with junk.” Basically, it’s too full. It’s not that the well is empty; it’s that it’s too full with junk. Returning to creative health is a process of clearing stuff out.

Sometimes what’s clogging the well is emotions, but sometimes it’s just life. Sometimes there’s just too much going on, and you need to be able to say, “No.” You have to be able to set those boundaries with yourself so that you have space, you have downtime, you have the ability to just be with yourself and your creativity. Just stare out the window and dare to daydream—things like that.

I think we miss that sometimes in hustle culture, and certainly the writing industry in general has a lot of hustle culture. And yet the essence and the foundation of what we do as creatives requires stillness. It requires space, and we have to be willing to take care of our creative health if it’s going to supply and fuel all the things we want to do and put out into the world.

Lesson #6: Your Fellow Writers Are Not the Competition

Now, this was never a huge problem for me, but I’ve definitely refined my perspective over the years. Again, I think much of the potential problem here is that what it means to be successful as a writer is often so undefined. Writers often aren’t sure what we’re trying to get out of the experience—and so we sometimes borrow definitions from the world or from other people. It’s easy to only look up to people who are making millions of dollars and selling massive amounts of books and getting huge movie deals and and things like that. Even on a smaller level, when people in our genre or maybe our writers group gets a book deal before we do something like that, it can be easy to feel less than, and, automatically by that token, to then feel a certain resentment or envy toward our fellow writers. We may feel, Well, because they got what I wanted or they got something better than I did, then their success is somehow endangering my opportunity to do the same.

Particularly within the writing field, however, this is categorically untrue. For one thing, every time somebody reads another book they love—every time a reader has a great reading experience—all that’s doing is opening the door for another book to come into their lives. They’re thinking, That was great! I want to do that again! And they’re looking out there for something else—and that could be your book. So whenever a fellow writer is successful, it’s a win for everybody. The demand for stories is insatiable. It’s only a matter of if you can put out good ones that people like and get them into readers’ hands.

Being able to look at it that way can help with sometimes this tendency we have to resent fellow writers’ success or let it make us feel less than, because if we flip that on its head and start looking at our fellow writers—particularly those we admire or want to be like—as inspiration, they become “way showers” for what is possible for us.

More than that, you can study what they do. They’re presenting a model of how to do it, and you can study that to figure out what fits you and what is actually in alignment with why you’re doing this and what you’re doing.

Reframe any of this insecurity that arises in response to a fellow writer’s success into an opportunity to get where we want to go to. View them as someone who’s ahead of us on the path and therefore breaking trail. They’re breaking trail and showing the way for us.

Lesson #7: Writing Is the Most Challenging Mirror of All

When we dig deep into the lifestyle and really commit to it, we can use it in this meta way to grow our own lives.

Writing is difficult by nature. It requires discipline and consistency. It shines a light on the parts of ourselves that are insecure or where our ego is in control. It is also, by nature, an extremely vulnerable act.

Writers have to be very brave to go into the authenticity of showing parts of ourselves, whether it’s our characters or whatever else that we’re putting into these stories. To share them with other people, who could say or think anything about it, we are putting ourselves out there in such a real and raw and honest way. That requires profound courage.

Now sometimes, we don’t look before we leap. We don’t realize what we’re doing. We put the book out there, and Whoa. I feel that way every time I put out a new project or book. I’m happily writing it and then I put it out there and feel, Oh my gosh, what have I done?

But for me, the writing life has been such an incredible experience for deepening my understanding and my relationship to myself. So basically the lesson here is don’t become a writer and go deep in this lifestyle unless you’re able and willing and want to have the full experience of human life and what it means to be here in the range of emotions and the ups and the downs and to face those deep challenges

Being a writer will offer those challenges. Now, these challenges are not insurmountable. I don’t intend this caveat to imply, “Oh, writing is too hard.” No, it’s glorious. It’s just that it’s not easy.

Something I’ve learned and will probably always be learning in different nuances as I go through as I continue to write is that there’s always more to learn about the writing life and that it’s such a mirror for myself and my own experience. As long as I’m brave enough to look in the mirror, there’s so much there for me to be able to learn and expand and to grow. The never-ending story of our own lives is basically what is being reflected back to us.

Lesson #8: “Being Published Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be. But Writing Is.”

Finally, lesson number eight is a quote from Anne Lamott in her book Bird by Bird, which I just have always really appreciated and loved.

Being published isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. But writing is.

I come back to that again and again. I mean, being published is great. I fully love it, but at the end of the day, making the most of the writing life comes back to knowing why you’re doing what you’re doing.

For me, publication is not why I’m doing it. I’m doing it for the journey. It’s the idea that it’s not about the destination; it’s about the journey. When I can stay in that place and remember that and be present with the journey, then it just elevates the entire experience. It allows what I’m able to bring to my stories or to my teaching to be so much richer and deeper and more valuable.

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You can see a theme in all of my eight lessons. I suppose basically we could sum it up like this: For me, writing has been so much more than just about telling stories or writing books. It has been this incredible journey through the depths, the heights, the lows of life itself. Being able to look at it that way and see it in that light is so powerful and so exciting.

I hope some of this is food for thought, that it’s interesting or helpful to you on your writing journey. I’d love to hear some of the most important lessons you have learned in your writing life!

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! What are some of the top lessons you’ve learned as a writer? Tell me in the comments!

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