If you’ve been working on your novel for a while—and I mean really working, not just thinking about it—you’ve probably had this feeling at least once:
I know how to write. Why is this so hard?
Maybe you were an English student who always did well. Maybe you wrote papers in college that got praised. Maybe you have a graduate degree, a career that required clear writing, a shelf full of craft books you’ve actually read. You are not someone who struggles with words.
And yet here you are, and the novel isn’t coming together the way you thought it would, and there’s so much to learn, and you can’t quite figure out why nobody told you any of this before.
Here’s why: because that wasn’t their goal.
What English Classes Actually Teach
English classes teach you to read carefully and write analytically. It teaches you to construct an argument, support a thesis, analyze a text, and express ideas clearly in prose. If you were good at those things — and a lot of writers are — you got the A’s.
But none of that is fiction writing. Not even close.
Fiction writing isn’t about constructing an argument. It’s about rendering a scene so specifically and physically that a reader forgets they’re reading. It’s about putting a body in a room and letting the reader feel the temperature of that room, the tension between the people in it, the way time slows down when something important is about to happen. It’s about verbs and point of view and the difference between showing a reader something and explaining it to them.
Those skills don’t show up on any essay rubric. They’re not what your teacher was grading. They’re a completely different discipline. And there’s no reason you would have encountered them in an English classroom.
If you got A’s in honors English, even earned a graduate degree, or have done plenty of writing in your professional life, you might be asking, What did I miss?
The answer is: nothing. You didn’t miss anything. You learned exactly what that class was designed to teach. It just wasn’t this.
What This Actually Is
What we’re doing when I work on a client’s novel isn’t something taught in high school or college. It isn’t catching up on something you should have already known.
It’s graduate level creative writing work.
This happens in MFA programs, in workshops, in one-on-one sessions where someone reads your pages and tells you the truth about what’s landing and what isn’t. It’s where you learn that a sentence can be grammatically perfect and still fail to put the reader in the room, where you learn that dialogue without body language is just words floating on a page, and where you learn about the gap between the story in your head and what’s on the page for a reader.
None of this is in Strunk and White.
Give Yourself a Break
Many writers I work with are hard on themselves. They assume that because they’re educated readers, because they’ve always been good with words, that they should be further along than they are. They treat their own learning curve as evidence of some fundamental deficit.
It isn’t. It’s evidence that they’re doing something genuinely difficult that nobody prepared them for.
Is this you? If this resonates for you, take note:
You’ve picked up a new instrument. A hard one. And you’re learning to play it without having had lessons as a kid, without years of practice, without anyone around you who could explain it—not even your favorite beta reader or friend.
This isn’t failure. It’s just where you are. And it’s exactly where I can help.
If you want to find out what’s actually happening in your pages — and what your specific next step is — you can book a short consult here. I’ll read some of your work before we meet, and we’ll look at it together.
