Why writing is like cold fusion

It has recently occurred to me that the real problem with writing a novel—or with giving advice about writing a novel—is that writing a novel is a lot like inventing cold fusion.

No one in the world has ever invented cold fusion. People have invented a lot of other things, but not cold fusion. Consequently, no one can provide a step-by-step process that is guaranteed to work for inventing cold fusion (or, indeed, for inventing anything else that hasn’t already been invented). They can tell you a lot of techniques and steps and procedures that worked out for people who invented something else, but the closest anyone can get to advice about inventing cold fusion is “Doing it this way worked for the person who invented the wheel/lightbulbs/mass production/movies/social media. So it might work for inventing cold fusion. Try it and see what happens.”

Obviously, none of those techniques or procedures has actually worked for anyone who has tried to use them to invent cold fusion, because as of this writing, nobody has succeeded in doing so.

Lots of people have written novels, but nobody has ever written the novel I’m trying to write (if they had, I would be a plagiarist, not an author). This is true no matter how many other things I have already written. Every book is a new invention, something that has never been done before. No book requires exactly the same techniques and processes as any of the ones before it.

Oh, there’s overlap. Some things are consistent for a particular author from book to book…until suddenly they aren’t. I cannot count the number of times I have heard another experienced author say (or have said myself) “I just started writing a new book, and I think I have forgotten how to do this.” I don’t think there is any author I have known for more than a few minutes who hasn’t said something like this.

It’s not forgetting how to do it. It’s forgetting that the whole process has to be reinvented, from scratch, and no matter how similar it is to what one did last time, it won’t be exactly the same. How one invents a light bulb is not the same as how one invents a computer. Or cold fusion.

The biggest problem comes when a writer has, to some extent, settled in to a particular process. The writer knows they are a pantser, or a planner, or a burst writer, or a plodder, or a linear writer, or that they skip around. They know that they have trouble writing action, or emotional scenes, or transitions, or dialog. They know that they always get bogged down around chapters five, twelve, and fifteen. They know that when they hit chapter twenty there will be a sudden lovely downhill run to the end of the book, or that they can write their first four chapters in a white-hot heat over a single week before they slow down.

They know all these things because they’ve written enough books to see the pattern in how they work, to know what’s comfortable for them and what’s not. The hard bits and the less-hard bits become first, recognizable, and then, predictable—not in the details of their content, but in their category. “I always get stuck here. I always have trouble writing that kind of scene. I love writing action/dialog/narrative because for me it always flows.”

Except that even in these books, there is “always” something new, something that doesn’t quite fit with the established process, because every book is inventing something that has never been invented before. Inventing something new can’t rely one hundred percent on the same old process, or it would already have been done.

The kicker is that, sooner or later, if they keep at it, almost every writer hits a novel that’s exactly like inventing cold fusion. Everything the writer knows (or thinks they know) about their process is wrong for this story. What they are writing just won’t come out unless they do something completely different. Sometimes, it’s because the type of story they’re writing is suddenly different for some reason—it’s plot-centered, when normally they write character-centered stuff, or it’s multiple viewpoint when they usually write single, or it’s an epic when they normally write short-story fix-ups. Or vice versa.

Often, though, there isn’t anything the writer can point at to tell them why they need to do something different. By the numbers, this story is just the sort of thing they write; they’ve done it for ten or twenty books now; why isn’t this working anymore? Should they give up and go back to something more comfortable? Have they really forgotten how to do this?

No. It’s because they’re inventing cold fusion. Of course it works differently. Nobody’s done that before, including them.

Successfully inventing something that no one has ever invented before isn’t easy. It often takes more than one try. It almost always takes longer than one expected. Sometimes it doesn’t work out at all. But if no one ever tried to invent things, we wouldn’t have the wheel, electric lights, cell phones, or the Mars rovers. So I think it’s worth trying to do. Even if nobody ever manages to invent cold fusion.