The Greatest enemy of a writer: Inconsistency

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In order not to further upset people, I will not be naming names in this article when it comes to negative examples. But you can easily look up what I’ll be talking about with a few clicks.

Rising Stars empowered many new and young authors; it gives them a way to establish themselves as big time authors right off the bat. Many big names have come out of Royal Road, especially in the LitRPG universe – or exclusively, one could argue. He Who Fight with Monsters, Dungeon Crawler Carl, The Beginning After the End. There are many titles that made it big. They have monster revenue, often both on Patreon and Kindle Unlimited.

When talking with other authors or industry outsiders, I hear a common question: “How did that book make it? It’s not that good, is it?”

Well, maybe. Without going into character assassination, I’ll say that some of the big LitRPG books don’t read that well. Some are unfairly criticized, too. But there’s one thing that separates the big players and the small fishes: consistency. You can argue all you want about some big series being a ‘fast-food book,’ and it’s ok – it’s in your rights to have opinions even if you only know American Literature. But the big players have consistency under their belts.

I remember a quote from Sanderson – and I’m not a fan, just to make that clear – where he said something on the line of ‘amateur writers might be good at paragraph writing, but they are not good at story writing.’ That’s the gist of it. He meant that amateurs can’t really manage the scope of a story and they end up writing themselves in corners or boring stuff.

I agree.

New writers succumb to the pressure of keeping up with a web serial because writing chapter by chapter online is hard. It’s not like a cozy deadline in three months. Every day is a deadline for a web serial writer. And if you want to keep up with that, your life better be in order. You don’t have stability, it’s extremely hard to write web novels or even just kindle LitRPGs. Do you know the running joke of how many LitRPG et similia writers are US veterans? Hell, it’s true. There’s an overrepresentation of veterans and married people among those writers. How come? Well, it’s not far-fetched to assume that veterans have more structure and stability in their life, especially if there are married. Marriage has always been a refuge in the search for stability more than a hut for love, unlike many people think.

So, when you have a meteoritic rise in RoyalRoad’s lists or Kindle, you might suffer. Hell, you might suffer a lot. If you are not able to take shit from life and people, you are done. Reviews and comments will be mean. Your life will throw curveballs at you. If you don’t have stability and consistency, you will find it very hard to keep up. And that’s not just in life. Your story needs the same qualities.

Big stories manage very well to stay consistent. And like in soccer, if you have the reins on your game, opportunities to score will arise. That means that if you manage to keep the tone leveled for a hundred chapters, and then you ramp it up and make your reader cry like a bitch, you have done it. You have made it. But if your consistency is not straight and your novel resembles a narrative rollercoaster – I mean that in a very negative way – you are not going to keep the readers hooked long enough to score when the opportunity arises.

So, get your life and your book in order. Make plans for books, follow a diet, get your exercise in, get married or at least stay with a person who’s not toxic, drop deadweights in your life, build a routine. And I’m not joking. A good relationship goes a long way in making you successful. Look it up if you don’t believe me.

Being a top writer is not much different from being a top athlete. You can be a massive talent, but you’ll only realize part of it if you don’t train properly and if your life is not in order.