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Learn this now. Succeed as a writer later.
My sister texted me yesterday with a link to a story called “The Thousand Pages” from the novelist J.T. Bushnell. He wasn’t always a novelist. He used to be a short story writer. In the essay he writes about his transition from one form to another. The piece is full of great and practical advice about episodic structuring and the need for characters to change internally from chapter to chapter, but what lingered were Bushnell’s thoughts about the 1,000 pages of his novel he didn’t publish.
“It took me four years to produce a workable manuscript — and another half decade to revise it — and I threw away well over a thousand pages in the process. As Blacketter said, though, none of them were wasted…
“Moving from one to the other is like building cabins and then deciding to erect a skyscraper. No matter how functional and aesthetically pleasing your cabins are, you can’t just keep building them, one on top of the other, or build an enormous one into the clouds. It will collapse, as my first few attempts did. You need new materials, new tools, new blueprints. And you need to learn how to use them.
“Writing a thousand pages let me accomplish that learning. It let me explore every nook and cranny of the form, inside and out, from several angles…
