Writing the Breakout Novel (the link is for the workbook) was the book that I needed to read three times over a decade to understand. I recommend people buy both, but the workbook is the workhorse. The book focuses on how other authors did it. The workbook asks the reader to consider how they could, which a far more valuable lesson to underpublished writers.

I read WtBN when it first came out. It specifically says in the beginning that the book is not for unpublished writers, but like most unpublished writers, I saw myself as a published writer not yet published until I published my first short story. It’s why “underpublished” needs to be a category of writers. The term includes unpublished writers as well as self-published and traditionally-published writers who have sold their work on a professional or semi-professional basis, but not in a way that starts to reflect the effort put into their work.

Thanks to the Dunning Kruger Effect, when I read WtBN, I was thrilled. I knew how to do everything the book talked about. Of course I didn’t, but my brain translated “that makes sense” to “this is easy.” It forgot all the work necessary to go from something that makes sense to something that is easy to do.

At this stage in my life, I was telling far more than I was showing the reader why things mattered and I had convinced myself those were equal choices. I wrote Misbegotten, Unforgiven, rewrote them both entirely, and cranked out dozens of short stories and more fanfic than any one writer ever needed to produce before I reread the book again in my early thirties.

I was starting to sell my short fiction if the short story emerged perfectly with a crystalized form or I didn’t even bother to send it out. My novels were still messes. When I reread the book cover to cover, I realized that I wasn’t actually doing any of it and I still had to learn how I could.

I didn’t read WtBN again until after I’d filled up a lot of my Gap with Angela Fiddler works. By the time I did a third read-through, I argued with the book. I wanted it to consider X, Y and Z when it said F. I felt quite superior for a few months before picking up a copy of the 21st Century Fiction and realized, of course, my arguments had been considered.

When Mr. Maass did a workshop based on the book in Bragg Creek, I was quite hurt that he was just telling learners things that had taken me years to figure out the hard way. I felt like I’d climbed to the top of a mountain, only to look over and see an escalator that went all the way to the top.

But according to Bloom’s Taxonomy, Knowing something is true is only the second step of learning anything. Learning how to use it is only one step up from that. Knowing how to use what you’ve learned to create something new is a level above that, and understanding how to evaluate your use of the new knowledge is the pinnacle of knowledge itself.

All Maass gave the students was a roadmap of what they should be learning over the next decade. It wasn’t an escalator, it was an instruction manual for the tools of the job. No matter how great the lesson was taught, the student still needs to learn how to apply the information to their process themselves.

This is why writing books can be dangerous to the underpublished writer. Had I read WtBN once and thrown it into the closet, I might not have realized that knowing something and knowing how to use something were two different aspects of learning, even for me.

And I wasn’t even an exceptional writer. But it took realizing that I wasn’t to understand I could yet still be.