There will never be one writing process that will suddenly make all your words flow all the time and have you finishing projects at record speed.
It’s an appealing idea. Somewhere out there is the perfect method, the right app, the ideal morning routine, the one plotting system that will finally make writing easy. Find it, and everything will click.
It won’t.
Writing a novel is hard work. It takes time, effort and a great deal of what feels very much akin to bashing your head against the keyboard. That’s true for brand new writers and for authors with dozens of books behind them. Even a process that works beautifully for one book might not work for the next.
It’s even true for authors who write with AI. At the time I am writing this article, we can’t just tell a chatbot to write a 50K novel and then get exactly that with the click of a button. We might get 50K words (or thereabouts because AI stinks at word count), but those words will need a lot of shaping in order to bring them into something resembling a decent novel. I’m fully aware that as the technology advances, this might change things. But are we going to call that “writing” a novel?
While none of us are going to find that one silver bullet process by copying another author’s routine, even if it seems they have a far more streamlined and effective process than we do, we can still learn from other writers and what their processes look like.
Listen to other writers’ processes and try them out for yourself. Read the craft books, listen to the podcasts, ask your writing friends how they do it. Borrow what’s useful. Experiment. Some ideas will change the way you work forever. Others will feel completely wrong for you, and that’s useful to know too.
What you need to resist is the false belief that someone else is doing it right while you’re not.
Every writer’s process is shaped by their life, their energy, their brain and the types of stories they want to tell. The author who drafts a novel in a month isn’t doing it more correctly than the author who takes three years. The plotter isn’t more professional than the pantser. They’re just different.
Your process doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s. It only has to work for you.
There’s no quick and easy way. There’s only your way, and you’ll find it by writing.
