Writing and publishing is hard work-that is the hard truth. Many of us will not be the next J.K. Rowling and that’s okay. If you still have a story to tell, by all means get to it! There are many ways to organize and write-you have to do you. My story took 10 years to write. School, job, life does get in the way. I find it easier myself to take a few minutes each day, my lunch hour, for example, and see what comes out on my computer. I find that method more effective than, for example, trying to sit in the computer all day trying to write. You do you, but that is what works for me. You want quality, not quantity.
Now, any published author may tell you that the easiest part of publishing a book is to write it. They’d be right. That sounds hard to believe but many of us are not skilled in marketing a novel and pitching it to agents and publishers. If, with a bit of luck and a bit of hard work, you get an offer to traditionally publish, or if you want to be brave and self-publish, then what awaits you is, at the very least, several rounds of editing and marketing plans. And while you may be expecting the occasional typo or passive sentence that may sound better written another way, questions about particular ideas and “where are you going with this chapter” will surface too.
These inquiries are not necessarily bad. Your editors, agents, helpers, will be readers too and are not present in your head. You’re going to be so entrenched in your story that you might think there is only one way that readers have to view it. And that might not be necessarily the way the readers will take it. But I want to caution you on something. Take the constructive criticism, your helpers know what they are doing either as readers or experienced people in the writing field, perhaps both. But stick to your vision. If you visualize a particular scene a certain way and maybe a helper wants it another way, ask why and come to a plan that maybe integrates both visions. I have heard so many suggestions because “that may sell better” or “this has been done, what about doing this?” or… “I would like that scene to talk more about this.” These are, remember, suggestions. They are well intentioned, but do not forget you wrote your story for a reason. Your vision was something that you felt, for whatever reason, needed to be told. So take the suggestions if you think they are good ones, but do not forget your vision and try, no matter what changes are necessary and desired, for your work to remain a part of you, the part that you wanted to share with the world.