Will Wight on His Writing Process

“It really only takes me three months to write a book. So that’s three months of hard, focused work. Now the problem is, it takes me six months to do these three months’ worth of work, not because I’m sitting around playing games all the time, but because I feel like in my head that I can’t get the story out the way I like it, so I sit there trying to think and tinker, and I’m like, ‘If I only had a little bit more time, I could make it perfect in my brain, and then it’ll come out on the paper and it’ll be the greatest.’ And that never works because it’s an illusion.”

“What I think happens, and it certainly happened to me, is that people hold themselves to this impossible standard of envisioning perfection first and then putting it on paper. So they get caught in this loop of they never do anything because they’re waiting to have all the answers and they’re trying to put together The Godfather in their head when they’ve never written a word on paper. What you do instead is you learn while working. You work to learn; you learn while you work. And in my case, I think, ‘Why not put it out there and get feedback from readers and learn in the wild?’ You can’t write a book until you’ve written a book.”

“The number one thing I say all the time is—Purpose. Target Group. Strategy. I apply it to everything I do. Why am I doing this? Who am I doing it for? And what is my strategy for reaching those people for that purpose?”

For more information on Will Wight’s work, visit https://www.willwight.com/

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