There is something almost ridiculous about trying to explain what a writer does all day.
From the outside, it looks fairly straightforward.
You sit down. You open a document. You type words.
Occasionally, you stare at the screen for an unreasonable amount of time before deleting half of what you just wrote.
Simple enough.
Except the actual writing is only a fraction of the work.
There are entire conversations that happen before a single line of dialogue reaches the page. Decisions made and discarded. Characters whose histories are so thoroughly developed that most of what I know about them will never appear in a finished book.
I can spend an hour figuring out why a character refuses to answer a perfectly reasonable question.
Not what they’ll say.
Why they won’t say anything at all.
And sometimes that distinction changes an entire chapter.
The Stories Behind the Story
Every novel contains more than the reader will ever see.
There are childhood memories that explain a character’s reaction to something seemingly insignificant. Relationships that ended years before the story begins. Private fears, old loyalties, habits, regrets, and decisions that shaped the person standing on the page.
Most of those details don’t belong to the manuscript.
But I still need to know them.
Because a character’s past should influence their behaviour even when the reader doesn’t know exactly what happened.
A woman who has spent years learning not to trust people doesn’t suddenly become comfortable with vulnerability because the plot needs a romantic scene.
A man who has built his entire identity around control doesn’t abandon it without a reason.
And someone who has survived something terrible doesn’t conveniently forget it once the immediate danger has passed.
Those things matter.
Even when they’re invisible.
When Nothing Gets Written
Some of my most productive writing sessions produce very few words.
Which sounds like a contradiction until you’ve spent a full forty minutes working through a scene that refuses to cooperate.
Sometimes the problem isn’t the dialogue or the description.
It’s that I’ve asked a character to do something they wouldn’t actually do.
Or I’ve pushed an emotional moment too quickly.
Or I’ve written a perfectly functional scene that doesn’t feel remotely honest.
So I stop.
I think about what came before it, what comes after it, and what the character actually wants.
Occasionally, I discover the entire scene belongs somewhere else.
Occasionally, it doesn’t belong anywhere.
That’s always a delightful discovery after spending several hours writing it.
But those hours weren’t necessarily wasted.
They taught me something about the story.
Even if the lesson was that I had been confidently heading in the wrong direction.
The Decisions That Never Make the Page
For every chapter that survives editing, there are countless choices the reader will never know existed.
Different conversations.
Different reactions.
Sometimes entirely different endings.
I’ve written scenes knowing exactly where they were supposed to go, only to realize halfway through that the characters had earned something more complicated.
Not necessarily happier.
Not necessarily easier.
Just more truthful.
And that’s where writing becomes particularly interesting to me.
The challenge isn’t simply deciding what happens next.
It’s understanding why it happens, what it costs, and whether the people I’ve created would genuinely make those choices.
A reader might spend three minutes on a conversation that took me three days to get right.
That’s not a complaint.
That’s the job.
Ideally, the reader never notices how much work went into making those three minutes feel natural.
More Than a Word Count
Word counts are useful. Deadlines matter. Finished manuscripts don’t appear through determination alone.
But I’ve never believed the value of a writing day can be measured entirely by how many words were added to a document.
Some days are for drafting.
Some days are for editing.
Some are for pulling apart a chapter and discovering what was wrong with it in the first place.
And some are spent sitting with an idea until it becomes something worth writing.
The work isn’t always visible.
It isn’t always measurable.
And it certainly isn’t always glamorous.
There are no dramatic orchestral soundtracks playing when I finally figure out why a character has been behaving strangely for six chapters.
Usually, there’s just me, a keyboard, and the deeply irritating realization that the answer was obvious all along.
But that’s part of what I love about writing.
A finished novel might look like a collection of words arranged into chapters.
To the writer, it’s also a collection of thousands of decisions, revisions, discoveries, and moments of doubt that somehow became a story.
The reader doesn’t need to see all of that.
They just need to feel that the world exists beyond the words on the page.
And if I’ve done my job properly, they will.
Because sometimes the most important work in a story is the work the reader never sees.
— L.A. Keane
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