A couple days ago Penny Arcade posted a great scathing comic about an ad for an LLM; the ad promised that new users could “start writing for free!” Of course you can always start writing for free. People have been writing for free. Writing has one of the lowest barriers to entry of any modern skill. As someone posted on Bluesky, where I went to joke about this: All you need is a pen and paper, and you can still steal pens from the bank.

There’s a chilling implication in that ad, of course: you might be able to start writing for free but you can only finish by buying something. It’s an attempt—ultimately doomed, I think, by the sheer perversity and orneriness of the human animal—not to empower you but to take a power away, or to convince you that you don’t have the power, or can’t develop it quite easily for the low low price of dedicating a chunk of your one and precious life to this.

There’s a lure dangled in front of all writers, myself included, a lure that promises clicks, attention, and once in a while even a tiny bit of fame. And here’s the lure: People want to know how to do it.

The dirty secret is that 99.999% of it is just time. You write. You write some more. After a while, you stop and re-read what you’ve written. You think about it. You change things so you feel better when you re-read, or so you have a more vivid sense of where you’re going, or what you’re saying.

But consistency and dedication and work and care are boring and hard. Weird tricks and secret codes are fun and exciting. Weird tricks and secret codes make you think, “that’s why this felt so hard! I was doing it wrong!” Providing weird tricks and secret codes can also reinforce (in an ego-protective sort of way) a barrier in the writer’s mind between themselves and the aspirant. Advice helps the writers who offer it feel more real.

There’s lots of to be gained by talking about models and structure and rules and all. I have a shelf of how-to-write books too! The .001% that isn’t just time is still real, and if you like to write you probably like thinking about writing, even when you’re not doing it. As in running or weightlifting, contemplation of technique can help make the practice more fun, rewarding, sustainable, injury-free. Sometimes you end up on a plateau where you’re putting in the work and putting in the work and just not going anywhere—and you need a different way to think about the work you’re putting in, to unlock the new powers that have been growing inside you through all that grind. That’s where a good workshop or a class or a coach can help.

But the grind needs to be there for any of that other stuff to work. And for most people the marginal benefits of improved consistency and dedication would far outstrip the marginal benefits of whatever microscopic difference in form or workout design you’re currently stressing over. Sure, think about Freytag, Maslow, Aristotle, triangles and arcs and snowflakes and architects and gardeners and Gardner (I love Gardner), whatever, but are you writing?

I think part of the trouble is that we often forget what writing looks like. I sure do! If we’re not Snoopy bent over the typewriter, are we writing? It can feel like the answer’s no. I wonder how many aspiring writers hit the point where they’re staring at the page and nothing suggests itself immediately, and think that means they’re not writing then, that they’re not writers, and get scared.

If you’re never bent over the typewriter, or equivalent, if there are never any words, that’s the point where it may help to reconsider your approach, diet, sleep. But that focus on word counts or page counts or progress bars or throughput can mislead. You don’t say that a chess player’s only playing chess when she’s moving the pieces. A lot of it is sitting at the board in silence.

If you read any of the highly mythologized publicly available routines of notable writers, and do some math, you’ll see what I mean. Lee Child talks about writing 1500-2000 words in a day, a common figure among these sorts of publicly available routines. A good typist hits 100 words a minute. What does Lee Child do with the other seven hours and forty minutes?

A lot of staring at the board, I’ll bet.

Yesterday I sat down at my desk and stared at the board. The wheels and weights and engines of the book spun in my mind, and something wasn’t right. I realized I’d been feeling this way for days, the pressure gathering with each step forward. I scribbled a few lines in a notebook. I stared at the cursor. I sat in silence. Three hours and zero words later, I knew what I had to do. These were three focused hours. I felt, coming out of them, like I had been deep underwater. I rose with a terrible clarity. I went and lifted weights and my muscles sang. And then I sat down and the words flowed like a stream in spring.

Good luck to you as you’re staring at the board.