How great writers improve—do they really need to, or do they just have the talent to begin with?
When you sit down to write and it’s just not working, do you secretly worry that maybe you just don’t have it? That natural-born genius that the great writers seem to have?
We all do this. We look at writers we admire and we say, “Well, they were born with a gift and I obviously wasn’t.”
I want to challenge that belief. There is a specific mechanism in your brain, something physical, that separates the masters from the amateurs. And the best part? It has nothing to do with how you were born and everything to do with something else that you absolutely can control.
In fact, I’m going to tell you how to actually rewire your brain to become a better writer.
Inside Your Brain’s Road System And How Great Writers Improve
So, how do we do that rewiring?
You know that feeling when you’re trying to write a scene and it feels like your brain is wading through mud? That slowness isn’t a lack of talent, it’s a lack of infrastructure.
To fix it, you need to understand what I call the road system inside your head. That road system is a big part of how great writers improve over time.
The Nerve Fibers
First, you have the nerve fibers. These are the tiny strings that carry electrical signals through the brain. Every time you have a thought, like I need a better verb here, that signal has to travel down one of those fibers.
Think of the nerve fiber as the road itself. It connects point A to point B in your brain.
The Signal
Second, you have the signal. Think of your thought as the car driving on that road.
When you’re a beginner, your nerve fibers are bare. So in our analogy, that means that the road is just a rough dirt path. It’s full of potholes and rocks. Because the road is bad, the car—your thought—has to drive slowly. It shakes and it loses momentum and it bumps around and sometimes stalls out completely.
That friction on the dirt road is physically what writer’s block feels like, or what it feels like when you’re trying to get the scene to sparkle the way you want it to and it’s just not working. You’re going back and you’re trying again and maybe it gets a little bit better, but it’s still not where you want it to be.
That’s because you’re on this dirt road.
But the great writers you admire? They aren’t driving on dirt roads. They’re driving on superhighways. Their thoughts travel at high speeds without hitting a single bump because they have these smooth, paved roads that they can just go barreling down as fast as they like.
That’s why they can think about writing a really good story and produce a really good story a lot easier than those of us who may be still working on it.
Meet Myelin: The Brain Pavement Behind How Great Writers Improve
So, how do you turn a dirt path into a smooth highway? Well, you need pavement, right?
In your brain, that pavement is a substance called myelin. Myelin is a dense layer of fat that wraps around the nerve fiber, and its job is to insulate the wire so that the electricity from your thoughts doesn’t leak out.
In our analogy, think of myelin as a layer of fresh asphalt. When you wrap a nerve fiber in myelin, it is like a road crew showing up to pave that dirt path.
If there’s no myelin, you’re driving on dirt and potholes. It’s slow and it’s a lot of work. If there’s a lot of myelin, you’re driving on a smooth, paved freeway. The car glides effortlessly.
So when you see a genius writer whose sentences just seem to glide along on the page, what you’re really seeing is a brain that isn’t stuck on a dirt path anymore. It’s using a well-paved road.
But here’s the catch. You aren’t born with these highways. You have to pave them yourself.
So, how do you get the road crew to show up and start pouring that asphalt?
Why Struggle Is At The Heart Of How Great Writers Improve
What tells your brain to send out the road crew and start laying down that myelin pavement?
You might think the answer is writing a lot. Or getting in the flow. But neither of those things is the right answer.
The signal that actually triggers myelin growth is this: struggle.
Your brain is designed to be efficient. It doesn’t want to waste energy paving a road that you aren’t going to use intensely.
If you sit down and write scenes that are easy for you—if you stay in your comfort zone where the words flow perfectly and you feel great—your brain looks at that dirt road and says, “You know, the car is driving fine. We don’t need to do any construction there.”
Comfort signals your brain to stay exactly as it is.
But when you reach for a sentence that is just slightly beyond your current ability—when you try to write a complex emotion and you get it wrong and then you delete it and then you try again and you feel that frustration rising—that frustration is actually a good signal.
That feeling of this is hard is the distress flare that tells the road crew we have a problem here. We need to get a highway here now!
Psychologists sometimes call this kind of focused, effortful work deep practice or deliberate practice: you try, you fail, you fix, and you try again. Research on expert performance shows that this cycle of deliberate practice is strongly linked with high-level skill in many fields, not just the arts.
This is where most writers get it backwards. We think that if we’re struggling, it means that we lack talent.
But biologically, the struggle is the mechanism that creates talent.
How Great Writers Improve, One Awkward Sentence At A Time
Every time you correct a clumsy sentence, fix a plot that’s not working, speed up your pacing, or go back and edit a scene that needs to be more powerful—and every time you struggle to do that—you’re engaging in the type of deep practice that produces myelin.
You’re sitting there and you’re working on it. You’re trying this and you’re trying that and you’re feeling a little bit of that frustration. That’s your good sign.
Because when you’re doing that, what you’re actually doing in the brain is wrapping that nerve fiber in another layer of myelin. You are literally insulating the wire, which means you’re paving a little bit of that road.
The more you push to get better, the more your brain has to build a stronger fiber to connect the thoughts that you’re having and to be able to fire those thoughts faster and better. That is you improving your ability the more that you’re struggling.
No Roads When We Start
When we start out as writers, we’re not using the parts of our brain that we need to be able to write well because we’ve never done it before. So your brain has to lay down these new roads.
And if you think about it, whenever we make a new road the first time, it’s usually dirt, especially out in the rural areas. And that’s what’s happening in your brain.
So you might start writing a story. The first time you do that, you might create a little tiny dirt path like what you might find in the forest or on a trail.
You go back and do it again. The path gets a little wider. You go back and do it again and you’re struggling each time because you’re trying to get better.
The key here is struggle. When you’re trying to get better, that’s when the road crew comes in.
So the writers who improve the fastest aren’t the ones who find it easy! If you find writing difficult, it’s actually a good sign because that means you’re challenging yourself to get better.
Balancing Struggle And Ease As Great Writers Improve
I’m not saying that it should always be a struggle. We all have good days of writing when for some reason the muse is there or inspiration hits and the words just flow and we all love that.
But that is usually in between a lot of struggle days when we’re just trying to get down the scene and we’re fighting to make it the way that we want it to be.
The writers who are going to get better are the ones who are willing to stay in that uncomfortable zone of struggle longer than anyone else.
They aren’t suffering there. They’re paving the road.
But we still need to know, practically speaking, how do we force this to happen without just burning out?
Because on the one side, we want writing to be easy. It’s easier to get our writing done on those days. But on the other side, we want to improve our writing. So we understand now that struggle needs to be involved in that, but we don’t want to be constantly struggling with our writing.
So, how do we structure a writing session to maximize this myelin growth—to lean into how great writers improve—without frying our brains?
Step One: Chunk Down How Great Writers Improve
Step number one, chunk it down. You can’t pave the whole interstate in one day.
If you sit down trying to write a great chapter, you’re too vague. Your brain doesn’t know which specific circuit to insulate.
So instead, pick one tiny skill to struggle with today.
Maybe today is just about dialogue. Or maybe it’s just about sensory details in this scene. Or characterization. Or plot. Or setting.
Focus all your energy on that one dirt path.
By narrowing your focus, you increase the intensity of the signal in your brain, which brings out a bigger road crew.
This is one of the simplest ways to tap into how great writers improve. They don’t try to fix everything at once. They choose one stretch of road.
Step Two: Use A Golden Hour The Way Great Writers Improve
Step number two, the golden hour. Deep practice is exhausting, as I’m sure you know.
Remember, you’re physically building infrastructure in your brain. I think it’s important to picture this because the whole analogy of the construction crew is really appropriate here, because your brain is actually laying down a physical layer of fat around this nerve fiber.
That takes energy. That takes work. So it’s no wonder after we struggle with writing for a while that we get tired.
You can’t do this for four hours straight. Or maybe you can, but the danger is then you’re not going to want to go back and write for several days after that!
So the idea isn’t to try to marathon your way to genius. Just give yourself 45 minutes or 30 minutes or 15 minutes of intense, uncomfortable focus where you’re really pushing yourself, rather than four hours of distracted, easy typing.
The quality of the struggle beats the quantity of the time.
How to Manage Your Writing Routine
If you have only 15 minutes, then you can just use that 15 minutes. But let’s say you have 30 minutes. For the first 15 minutes of that session, you’re really going to focus on whatever you’ve chosen to focus on that day: characterization, sensory details, pacing, whatever it is. You’re really going to focus on improving that in that first 15 minutes.
When the timer goes off, you’re going to allow yourself 15 minutes of easy writing. Switch to a scene that comes easy for you or to a type of writing that comes easy for you.
In one way, this is going to prevent that exhaustion that might stop you from returning to writing the next day because your brain’s going to remember it was exhausting.
In another, it gives you a positive boost at the end of your writing session. You started out with the struggle, but you ended with the ease and the joy that you feel when you’re writing and it comes easily.
That mix of focused difficulty and gentle ease is a very practical version of how great writers improve without burning out.
Step Three: Embrace The Error As Part Of How Great Writers Improve
Finally, step number three: embrace the error.
When we write a bad sentence, we often sigh and call ourselves failures and get frustrated with ourselves.
Instead of that, try this: Pause and look at that sentence or scene you’re not happy with and ask yourself, “Okay, why isn’t this working? Why is this clunky here? Why isn’t this living up to my vision of it?”
Look it up if you need to. Check with your writing books or writing blogs or read a few pages from an author you admire and see how they do it.
I do this all the time and it’s been really helpful.
I will read a novel and say to myself at the end of that novel, “You know what? This author was really good at fight scenes.” Physical fights were really good in this book because my eyes would just go fast over the page to see what would happen.
So I will keep that book by my writing chair, and if I’m going to write an action scene and I’m struggling with it, I’ll pull out that book to see how this other author did it. I’ll deconstruct a fight scene to see exactly what words they used and what pacing they employed and all the other details.
Then I’ll go back and try to improve my scene, knowing what I now know from freshly looking at a really good fight scene.
Do You Have “Guidance” Books?
I do this with all kinds of different books. I keep them by my writing chair. This one’s my fight scenes, this one’s my setting, this one’s my characterization—whatever I can turn to if I start struggling in a scene in my own writing.
Seeing how the masters do it is always a good plan because that gives us some tools to help fix our own work.
So the key here is when something comes up that you’re not happy with and you know it’s not where you want it to be, then instead of getting down on yourself, use that as your signal to go and enter the struggle—to invite your ability to learn and to fix that issue.
When you do that, that is the exact second that myelin wraps around the nerves in your brain.
If you ignore the mistake or just delete it without analyzing it, then you’re sending the workers home early!
You have to stop treating mistakes as failures. In our analogy, a mistake isn’t a dead end. It’s just a dispatch call for the construction crew. It’s the only way that they know exactly where to point the fresh asphalt.
Talent, Struggle, And How Great Writers Improve Over A Lifetime
Ultimately, becoming a master writer isn’t about being born with a certain genius. It’s about showing up to the construction site, putting on your hard hat, and doing the work day after day.
I think this is really a hopeful message because I think it’s very pervasive in the arts world to believe that you’re either born with it or you’re not.
And to be honest, some people are born with genius. We know that’s true. But a lot more people are born with just a little talent that if they develop it, can turn into something amazing.
I have been teaching private lessons for over 35 years. In all that time, there’s been maybe three people who have walked through my doors that did not have a stitch of talent for music. Everybody else was talented.
That didn’t make the difference between whether they succeeded or not.
The difference was whether they were willing to embrace the struggle, take what talent they had, and build on it by trying to get better.
I have seen this with my own eyes and I think it’s extremely hopeful because if all of us have a little bit of this talent in us, all we have to do is be willing to develop that.
How to Improve Your Pages
Find one pothole in your current manuscript. One specific paragraph or scene or chapter that is bugging you.
Instead of avoiding it, spend 15 minutes rewriting it.
Try it three, four, or five different ways. Pull out a book from a writer you admire and see how they do that kind of scene. If you don’t have one of those books, then go find one, because it really helps.
Push yourself to make this better until you feel that specific frustration rising up, that feeling that your brain is stretching.
And when you feel that, stop and say to yourself, “This is the work. I’m paving my highway right now.”
If you’d like more information on your brain and how it works, check out my community over at the Writer’s Brain Studio. You can support this channel there and find a lot more help with your particular mindset type and with brain issues in general.