If it seems I’ve been dwelling much on language in recent months – its nature, its changes, its employment, the craft of it – the reason is not the number of episodes of the History of English podcast I’ve consumed. No, it is a familiar dissonance which seems to have become more pronounced, one with which I think all writers struggle to varying extents. This storytelling that we do, the craft of writing, is a permanently imperfect translational act; there will always be a gap between the stories we envision in our heads and the way they are conveyed in the words which appear on the page. The perceived size of that gap fluctuates over time, but it never closes completely.
The first piece of fiction I can remember writing was an uncontrolled flurry of words scribbled on notebook paper in the fifth grade. Somewhere, I think I still have some of those pages, probably amounting to barely legible pencil smudges by now. It was a rather derivative story, with a vaguely post-apocalyptic setting (in the same sense as Shannara is a post-apocalyptic setting), only one real character, and a magic system that began as a classic Earth-Fire-Water-Air manipulation, but which I, being me (even back then), turned into solid-plasma-liquid-gas, and added manipulation of the four fundamental forces (and yes, that manipulation of the forces eventually came around again in a more mature form in the second full-length novel I completed, which I called Fo’Fonas but which I intend to retitle when I return to it). Then, I had a vague sense the words didn’t match my vision of the story, but I didn’t dwell on the disconnect.
Well that I did not, as dwelling on the dissonance between our visions of a story and their implementation is a writing killer. At its worst, it stops one from writing at all. I started to become aware of the problem as I continued with sporadic story writing through successive years, and it is no small part of why I suffered from so-called worldbuilder’s disease in my late teens, when I created several completely realized worlds without stories to tell in them. The reason I began this site, and resolved to write Blood Magic, was in part to force myself to practice my writing in a deliberate way in order to help close the gap between the stories I told in my head and the stories I told on the page. From then until a little past when I finished writing Impressions, I felt it was working. And this is a matter of feeling, perception, more than it is something which can be objectively measured or conveyed, since the writing is the medium through which anyone else must approach the stories in our heads. It’s not that I felt my words were perfectly conveying what I wanted them to, but I was making progress. The words came, and the story took form, and it was something close to what I wanted it to be.
Something changed. Part of it was that my writing became more inconsistent, with the period of time in the spring of 2025 when I struggled to find motivation to write, and then the busyness which so drastically reduced my writing time at the end of 2025 and in early 2026. I lost momentum, which is always a difficult thing to recover. However, perhaps because of that lost momentum, when I returned to writing, and when I return to it now, I am more aware of the words I am choosing, I think about the writing itself more with each sentence, and that is a problem. It makes me more aware of the gap, makes the gap between the story I want to tell and what seems to be appearing on the page loom larger. My reading has also had an impact, revising my standards and expectations for myself upwards from where I’d unconsciously set them in comparison with what I used to read. The prose standard set by Sanderson is far more approachable than that set by Dunnett, or the complexity of rhetoric discussed in The Rhetoric of Fiction.
Of course, the cure for the problem is to write more, in a way that constitutes deliberate practice. Knowing that does not make it less frustrating, however. I have a notebook from the past few months full of fits and starts of stories which barely get past the first line or the first couple of paragraphs, because I go back and read over what I wrote and know it’s not right. It’s not capturing the sense of the story I want to tell. Storytelling is so much more than simply describing context and events. To make the story come alive requires a thousand little decisions which shape the sense of a story, the way it evokes a feeling and inspires the imagination when it is read. When writers talk about the gap between our vision for a story and the words on the page, it is because we an read our own words, and what we imagine from them is not what we imagined to write them in the first place. That doesn’t make it a bad story, or bad writing, but it makes it not the story I’m trying to tell – which is, again, not a bad thing, but it is frustrating.
No one says storytelling is supposed to be easy, though. I will keep working at it, and I will keep sharing stories. Sometimes, the more significant challenge is remembering that not everything I write needs to become something publishable. It doesn’t even have to be good enough for me; it can disappear into a folder on my computer, and I never have to look at it again. If I practice enough, if I keep reaching for the right words, then eventually I will tell the stories I want to tell.
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