There is a version of being an author that involves a great deal of thoughtful gazing out of windows, a steady supply of excellent coffee, and the quiet satisfaction of a morning's work well done. This version exists. It occupies approximately eleven percent of the actual experience. The remaining eighty-nine percent involves talking to characters who do not exist to find out what they would do in a situation that also does not exist, making decisions about fictional weather with a seriousness that would alarm anyone observing from the outside, and periodically discovering that a plot problem which seemed entirely theoretical at the outline stage has become, at chapter seven, the structural equivalent of a load-bearing wall that someone has already removed. The weird side of being an author is not what anyone imagines when they imagine it, which is, in its way, one of the more reliable things about it.

Writing books is a strange occupation. It requires the practitioner to spend extended periods entirely inside their own head, making consequential decisions about people who do not exist, in places that have never been, for reasons that must be made to feel urgent to a reader who has no particular obligation to care. The practical reality of this process is considerably less romantic than its reputation and considerably more interesting than anyone who has not done it would expect. The weird side of being an author is not the dramatic part — it is the daily reality of a job that looks, from the outside, entirely unlike what it actually is.

The Weird Side of Being an Author: The Conversations Nobody Else Can Hear

An author spends a considerable portion of their working life in conversation with people who do not exist. This is not metaphorical. The process of understanding a character well enough to write them requires something functionally indistinguishable from a relationship — an ongoing, evolving exchange in which the character gradually reveals their preferences, their limits, and their entirely unexpected opinions about the plot.

Dracula, for instance, had views about the modern world that were not in the original outline. They arrived during the writing, unbidden and entirely in character, and several of them changed the direction of entire chapters. This is not a mystical experience. It is simply what happens when a character is understood well enough — they begin, in a practical sense, to behave consistently whether or not the author has planned for that consistency.

The weird side of being an author includes the experience of being surprised by your own characters — of writing a scene and discovering, at the end of it, that someone did something you did not expect, for reasons that make complete sense once they have done it. It is, on reflection, one of the better parts of the job.

The Decisions That Sound Absurd Out of Context

An author's working day contains a remarkable number of decisions that cannot be explained to anyone who is not currently writing the same book. Is it raining in Valcronis in the third chapter? It needs to be decided, and it matters, because the weather will affect the scene, and the scene will affect what follows, and three chapters later a detail will need to be consistent with the weather in chapter three whether or not anyone reading the finished book notices the rain at all.

What does ancient Uruk smell like in the morning? This is a question that requires research, inference, and a certain creative confidence about things nobody alive can verify. The answer must be specific enough to feel real without being so specific that it becomes a footnote. The question is entirely serious. The answer will appear in approximately one sentence. The consideration it required was disproportionate and entirely necessary.

These are the decisions that constitute the actual working life of an author — not the dramatic ones, not the inspired ones, but the quiet, practical, slightly absurd ones that accumulate across the length of a book into something that, when it is finished, appears to have been arranged rather than labored over. The weird side of being an author is that the labor is mostly invisible, which is as it should be, and occasionally maddening, which is also as it should be.

What the Weird Side of Being an Author Actually Looks Like From the Outside

An author at work is, visually, one of the least dramatic sights available. They are sitting. They are possibly staring at a wall. They may be making notes that will be legible only to themselves, in a notebook that has no discernible organizational system but is, to the author, a precise record of everything that matters. They may be reading something that appears entirely unrelated to the book they are writing — because research for a book about ancient Mesopotamia occasionally requires understanding ancient metallurgy, or early trade routes, or the specific agricultural challenges of a flood plain in the third millennium BCE.

The gap between what an author appears to be doing and what they are actually doing is one of the wider gaps in professional life. It looks like sitting. It is, in fact, the management of an entire world — its weather, its characters, its history, its internal logic, and its relationship to a reader who does not yet exist but will, eventually, arrive at the first page and expect everything to make sense.

The weird side of being an author is that success looks exactly like nothing happening at all. The books that reach a reader's hands arrived there through a process that looked, for most of its duration, like a person sitting quietly in a room. The storms, the arguments, the abandoned chapters, the weather decisions, the conversations with people who do not exist — none of this is visible in the finished product, which is correct and necessary. But somewhere in every book, in the specific texture of a world that feels inhabited and the particular voice of a character who behaved consistently whether or not they were supposed to, the work is still there. Invisible, and entirely present, and doing exactly what it was always meant to do.

Readers curious about what that process produced in one specific case may enjoy this post about how long it takes to write a book — which explores the timeline behind turning a story from an idea into something a reader can hold.