: Re: What's the point of writing that I know will never be used or read? Writing can be a very difficult, frustrating, stressful and effortful process. It can also be very isolating to the writer.

@Cooney417

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Look at this from another point of view. Let's say you're the reader. You're the audience member at a magic show, with a carefully calculated point of view. You get the full production, with music, atmospherics, banter, beautiful but distracting assistants. The trick goes off--you've never seen anything like it! It's the sort of thing you want to discuss with other people afterward. Maybe you were completely fooled, or maybe you could figure out in retrospect how it was done, but you were delighted.

That's what you are aiming for as a writer. You are showing the audience the performance. You want them to see the magic.

But you still need to do all the behind the scenes work. The magician needs to build the apparatus, work out the timing, the choreography. The trick can be based on months of planning before it's rolled out. But you don't show any of that to the audience because it ruins the trick.

So, analogies aside, you need to know everything that informs your novel, such as your protagonist's favorite cereal growing up or how she lost her virginity, but for god's sake, don't ruin the trick by showing it to your audience.

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