April Dávila

Free Mini Masterclass: Banish Writer's Block Forever! Learn More Here

April Davila - Author

Blog

The Long Game of a Writing Career

The current image has no alternative text. The file name is: Blog-Articles-Images-2026-5.jpg

I’ve been doing a lot of math around this lately, thinking about what a writing career actually looks like over time. Not the big debut-novel fantasy with the six-figure advance, but the quieter, slower version. The long game of a writing career. The version where you build an audience book by book, and end up with a body of work and a real readership.

There’s a kind of math writers do in their heads when they think about time. They count backward from some imagined deadline and decide there isn’t enough time left. I hear this from writers all the time, especially those in midlife who wonder if they started too late.

One of my favorite writers, my dad, wrote his first book in his sixties and worried that he wouldn’t live long enough to see it published. That was twenty years ago. He’s in his 80s now and working on book #4. 

The truth is none of us can say how long we have left on this planet. The writers I know who have thrived don’t rush to the finish line. They take the time to write the books that are on their hearts, publishing them one at a time, and building their career along the way. 

Why a Giant Debut Advance Often Hurts More Than It Helps

It’s easy to imagine that a breakout debut solves everything. In reality, it often creates a completely different set of challenges.

The pressure on the second book can be enormous. Every review will compare the sophomore effort to the first. Before long, the hardest part isn’t writing the next book. It’s quieting the voice in your head that insists you only had one good book in you.

Then there’s another reality that aspiring authors rarely hear about.

A huge debut advance sounds like a dream, but it also sets enormous expectations. If your publisher pays a six-figure advance, they expect six-figure results. Even a well-reviewed novel can be considered disappointing if it doesn’t earn back that advance, and as a debut author it’s difficult to get the kind of press that leads to six-figure sales.

One of the biggest questions publishers ask when considering your next book is surprisingly simple: did the last one earn out? If it didn’t, you likely won’t get another book deal. And in case it needs saying (I know we’re not the most math-minded bunch) a $5,000 advance is easier to earn out than a $100,000 advance. 

How the Long Game of a Writing Career Actually Pays Off

Fortunately, there’s another path, and it’s the one I’ve found myself on.

A steady start. A publisher who asked for the next book. Then another after that. Nothing dramatic, just a career built in increments.

That’s how many solid writing careers are built.

Every new book introduces readers to your earlier work. Someone discovers your newest novel, enjoys it, then goes back and buys the books that came before it. Readers who find you late often work their way backward through everything you’ve written.

It’s not flashy. It doesn’t generate headlines. But after several books, that steady accumulation starts to work in your favor. Little by little, the body of work does the introducing for you.

This is the part I wish more writers understood. The publishing world loves talking about overnight success, but most successful careers aren’t built overnight. They’re built one book at a time.

You Probably Have Twenty Years (and That’s a Lot of Books)

Back to that twenty-year clock.

In twenty years, you could write ten books. That’s a serious body of work.

One of my favorite stories comes from Lisa See, the Pasadena novelist. I saw her speak at an event once and she told how writing runs in her family. Her mother reviewed books for a living, and one day Lisa’s grandfather picked up one of the to-be-reviewed romance novels on the kitchen table, flipped through it and declared, “I could do better than that.”

He was in his eighties. And he did.

He became a romance novelist, and his books sold remarkably well. He built an entirely new career at an age when most people assume those opportunities have already passed.

If you’ve been carrying around the fear that you started too late, maybe it’s time to set it down. Sometimes the best writing career belongs to a later bloomer, someone with a little more perspective and a lot less hurry.

Ready to Finish the Book You’re Writing Now?

If you’ve been thinking about your writing career in terms of years instead of weeks, the next step is simple: finish the book you’re writing now. That’s exactly what my free webinar: How to turn your half-finished novel into a completed manuscript is built to help you do. I’ll walk you through the five biggest things that keep writers from reaching the finish line, and the practical shifts that shorten the path to a completed draft. A few live sessions are coming up this August, with a live Q&A at the end of each one. 

I hope to see you there.

Your Writing Process Doesn’t Have to Look Like Anyone Else’s

The current image has no alternative text. The file name is: Blog-Articles-Images-2026-4.jpg

Most writers, at some point, look up from the page and wonder whether their writing process is all wrong. They’re not writing at their usual time. They’re leaning on different rituals. They’ve landed in a rhythm that no longer resembles the one that used to work. It can feel like lost discipline.

It usually isn’t, because there is no single right way to do this.

But the impulse to find one makes sense. When writing feels difficult, uncertain, or slow, it is tempting to believe there must be a better method. A cleaner method. A method that would make the whole thing feel less like wandering around with a flashlight and more like following a map.

It’s kind of like how, when I was a new mom, one of my best friends (who was also a new mom) was convinced that if she could just find the right baby sling, parenting would be easier. She tried every brand she came across on social media and in the stores. She quickly collected over 8 different kinds of baby carriers and guess what: parenting was still hard. 

Writing is like that. 

Why Writers Keep Looking for the Perfect Writing Process

Most writers look for the right process because they want relief. They want to stop second-guessing themselves. They want progress to feel predictable.

The problem is that writers often mistake someone else’s method for a universal truth. They hear about a novelist who writes two thousand words before breakfast, or outlines on index cards, or never revises chapter one until the full draft is done, and suddenly that process starts to feel like a moral standard. It isn’t. It’s just one person’s way through.

Tidy Systems Are Seductive

There is something comforting about a system that looks organized from the outside. A perfect notebook. A color-coded outline. A morning routine.

Some of those things are genuinely useful. Anything that helps the work feel more visible and less slippery is worth keeping.

But sometimes what we love is not the process itself. It’s the certainty it gives us. A process can be beautiful, disciplined, and impressive while still not helping you write your book.

Real Processes Are Messier Than They Sound

Most writers, if they are being honest, have messier processes than they describe.

They say, “I write every morning,” and leave out the three days they avoided the draft before solving a scene while folding laundry. They say, “I outline first,” and leave out the fact that the outline changed completely by chapter six. They say, “I draft quickly,” and leave out the week spent staring at one transition, wondering if they had forgotten how language works.

That is not dishonesty. Writing processes are hard to summarize neatly because they are alive. They shift. They include false starts, weird rituals, accidental breakthroughs, and long stretches of doing your best with a brain that does not always cooperate.

Your Writing Process May Change From Book to Book

Keep in mind, too, that a writing process that worked beautifully for one book may be useless for the next.

One project may want structure. Another may want room. One season of your life may allow long, focused mornings. Another may ask you to write in scraps and notes on your phone in the carpool line.

That does not mean you’ve lost your process. It means you are writing under new conditions.

Writers would suffer less if they stopped asking, “What is my process?” as though it should be fixed forever, and started asking, “What does this project, in this season, need from me?” That is a kinder question, and usually a more useful one.

The Only Test That Actually Matters

The test is fairly simple. A process is useful when it helps you return to the work, stay with the work, and move the work forward.

That’s it. Not whether it looks disciplined. Not whether another writer on the internet swears by it.

A process that is messy but effective is still effective. One that is elegant but performative may not be helping as much as it seems.

If you’re feeling tangled up, try a small check-in. What part of writing feels hardest lately? What helps you re-enter the work with the least resistance? What are you doing because it genuinely helps, and what are you doing because it makes you look like a real writer?

What Helps No Matter How You Work

Your process can look however it needs to look. And even the best routines can’t protect you from the sticky moments in writing: losing the thread of the story, not being sure what shape it’s taking, running out of steam somewhere in the murky middle. Those aren’t signs that your process is broken. They’re just part of the territory, and they’re worth having a few tools for.

I put together a free webinar for exactly this, How to Turn Your Half-Finished Novel Into a Completed Manuscript, and I’m running on August 18, 20 and 23. It’s about the places drafts tend to stall, not about how anyone should structure their mornings, so nothing in it competes with the way you already work. We’ll spend an hour on what to do when the story loses its shape, and there’s a live Q&A at the end. No routine to adopt, no schedule to follow. Your process can stay exactly as it is.

Come as you are, messy notes and all.

Writing About a Niche Subject: How Much Should You Explain?

The current image has no alternative text. The file name is: Blog-Articles-Images-2026-7.jpg


When I was working on my first novel, I knew almost nothing about ostrich farming. By the time I finished, I knew a lot, and then I had to figure out how much of that to actually put on the page.

That tension, between what you know and what your reader needs to know, sits at the heart of writing about a niche subject. Whether you’re working with curling, paleontology, sailing, beekeeping, or an imagined world of your own making, you’ll eventually run into the same question: how much should I explain?

There isn’t one clean answer. But there are some things to consider.

Borrow A Fish Out Of Water

The most reliable tool when writing about a niche subject is the outsider character.

If you can, bring in a character who genuinely doesn’t know the world (a journalist, a new hire, a love interest, a younger sibling) and let the people who do know it explain things to them. The explanation feels natural because someone in the story actually needs to hear it.

You’ll see this a lot once you start looking for it, in books and in movies. The outsider character lets you put information into dialogue and reaction, where it tends to feel earned, instead of into narration, where it can feel like an info dump.

Let Setting And Action Carry The Weight

The other reliable move is to bake explanation into the action itself.

Carry Soto is Back is a great example. The book is all about tennis, a sport I know nothing about, but as the characters respond in scenes, I didn’t feel like I was scrambling to figure things out. I could tell what mattered by the way the story turned. 

If your characters can do, demonstrate, or react to the world rather than describe it, you’re usually in better shape. You can also lean on a supporting character whose role naturally requires explanation: a sports commentator, a museum docent, a teacher. Their work inside the story gives you a built-in reason to make the unfamiliar accessible.

Steal From Genres That Already Solved This

Sports romance is a goldmine here. Hockey, NASCAR, baseball: these books are written for readers who often don’t know the sport. They explain enough to make the stakes feel real, but not so much that they slow down what the reader actually came for. The same goes for technical thrillers and historical fiction set in unfamiliar professions.

Go to the library and pull two or three books that live in a world readers wouldn’t naturally know, and watch what they do. Where do they explain? Where do they trust the reader to fill in? This isn’t about copying. It’s about studying how writers you respect have handled the same problem.

When Writing About A Niche Subject, Trust Your Reader

Most writers err on the side of explaining too much, but readers are smarter than we give them credit for. If they don’t immediately know what a hog line is, they’ll figure it out from context, the way they figure out unfamiliar words in any book. You don’t need to define every term the first time it appears.

The F1 film is a fun example. I know nothing about Formula One racing (are you catching a theme here around me and sports?). But the announcers’ voices came in at exactly the right moments to tell me what was at stake. The explanations arrive at the moments of highest stakes, not in a wall of opening exposition. That’s the model.

Writing about a niche subject is harder than writing about something everyone recognizes, but it’s also where some of the most memorable novels live. Beekeeping. Lighthouse-keeping. Quantum physics. The specificity is what makes them stick.

Your job isn’t to teach the reader the whole profession. Your job is to drop them into a world they didn’t know they wanted to visit, and make them feel at home there so that they don’t want to leave.

Let’s Talk It Through

Finding the right balance between too much explanation and not enough is one of the most common places writers get stuck, and it’s exactly the kind of thing we can work through together. I’m hosting a free webinar on August 18, 20, and 23 (same session, three dates, pick the one that works for you). It’s called How to Turn Your Half-Finished Novel Into A Completed Manuscript. 

Come with your niche world, your half-explained curling rink, your beekeeping subplot, your imagined universe, and let’s talk about what your story actually needs. Save your spot here.

How to Outline Your Novel Without Killing the Joy

The current image has no alternative text. The file name is: Blog-Articles-Images-2026-8.jpg


If the idea of outlining your novel makes you want to run screaming into the woods, you are not alone.

Maybe you’ve tried it before. You sat down, you mapped the whole book, and watched the creative energy drain right out of the room. The story started to feel dead before you’d written a word. Every beat predetermined, every surprise gone before you’d had a chance to discover it.

If you’ve ever felt that, I want to tell you something: outlining your novel does not have to mean squeezing the life out of your story.

The False Binary of Plotter vs. Pantser

Writers love a binary. Plotter or pantser. Outliner or discovery writer. Structure person or intuitive artist.

But in my experience, most writers are not one thing all the time. Most of us move around.

You might start a project with nothing but a voice and a vibe, then realize fifty pages in that you desperately need a roadmap. Or you might carefully outline a novel, only to discover halfway through that your characters have other plans. That doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It means you’re writing a novel.

The plotter-versus-pantser conversation becomes another way for writers to judge themselves. If you outline, you worry you’re being too rigid. If you don’t, you worry you’re being irresponsible. Meanwhile, the actual question is much simpler: what helps you keep going?

What an Outline Is Actually For

Here’s how I think about it: an outline is not a contract. It is not a test. It is not proof that you know what you’re doing.

It is a tool. That’s it.

An outline exists to support the draft, to give you something to lean on when you lose the thread and help you remember where the story might be headed. It reduces the amount of flailing.

Some outlines are three neat pages. Some are a messy list in the Notes app. Some are sticky notes on a wall. Some are just a handful of questions and possible turning points. All of that counts.

The point is not to create a beautiful artifact. The point is to create something useful.

When Detailed Novel Outlining Helps (And When It Doesn’t)

For some writers, planning scene by scene is deeply liberating. It breaks the book into smaller pieces. Instead of holding an entire novel in your head, you only have to ask: what happens next?

That can be a huge relief. Scene planning is especially helpful when you tend to lose momentum in the middle or you’re working with multiple timelines and complicated cause-and-effect.

But there’s another truth here too. For some writers, too much outlining creates a kind of creative frost. The more detailed the plan becomes, the less alive the actual writing feels. If every beat is predetermined, there may be no room left for surprise.

And surprise matters. Sometimes the best part of writing fiction is discovering something you didn’t know before you started the scene. If detailed outlining makes you feel trapped, pay attention to that. You may simply be the kind of writer who needs some open space to hear the story clearly.

Build a Loose Outline That Can Grow With You

If you want structure without rigidity, try building a looser outline.

Start with what you know. Not what you think you should know. What you actually know. 

From there, you might sketch a few things: what your protagonist wants, what stands in the way, what might change in the middle, a few scenes you’re excited to write, questions you don’t know the answer to yet.

I especially love including questions in an outline. It makes the whole thing more honest. Because that’s the truth, isn’t it? Most of us are not outlining from a place of perfect knowledge. We’re outlining from a place of curiosity. And curiosity is a wonderful place to write from.

You Can Outline After You Draft, Too

This is the part I wish more writers knew: outlining is not only something that happens before the draft. Sometimes it happens after.

If you’ve already written a messy chunk of the novel and you’re trying to understand what shape it’s taken, a reverse outline can be incredibly helpful. Go back through your draft and write down what happens in each scene. One or two lines is enough.

Suddenly, you can see things like the energy drops or where things repeat. 

That isn’t cheating. That’s the work.

The only real measure of a useful outline is this: does it help you write the book? If your outline changes as you go, good. That probably means the story is alive.

Your outline doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be useful.

How to Let Your Characters Surprise You Without Losing the Plot

The current image has no alternative text. The file name is: Blog-Articles-Images-2026-6.jpg

One of the best parts of writing fiction is that your characters often become more interesting once you start drafting. If your characters surprise you, that’s usually a good sign. It means they’re becoming real on the page, not just behaving nicely inside the constraints of your outline.

Still, this is the point where a lot of writers get nervous.

You had a plan. The story was moving. Then suddenly your protagonist says something you didn’t expect, or maybe they refuse the scene you built for them, or develop a sharper edge than the version of them that you first imagined. Now you’re left wondering whether this is creative discovery or complete structural collapse.

Why Characters Change Once Drafting Begins

Characters often look one way in notes and another way in scenes. That’s normal.

In an outline, a character can seem clean and knowable. On the page, they become specific. They react. They contradict themselves. They reveal motives you didn’t fully understand when you were planning.

This is one reason drafting teaches you things outlining can’t. You learn who this person really is when they are under pressure. You see what they avoid, what they protect, what they want badly enough to make a mess for. That kind of discovery is useful. You don’t want to shut it down too quickly.

When the Outline Stops Fitting

Usually there’s a moment when you can feel the strain. The outline says your character would confess. The drafted version of them clearly would not. The outline says they would go home. The person on the page would pick a fight and disappear for a week.

At that point, many writers do one of two things. They force the character back into the old plan, or they throw out the plan entirely. Neither is ideal.

Try a quick pass instead. No overthinking. Ask three questions: Is this surprise making the character more specific? Does it increase pressure, tension, or consequence? Does it still belong inside the story this book is trying to tell?

Adjust the Plot, Not the Truth of the Character

Once a character sharpens, the story may need to change around them. That doesn’t mean you need a brand new book, but it often means you need a better-fitting version of this one.

If your character would never make the neat choice you planned, don’t force it just because the outline says so. Look for the version of the scene that honors who they’ve become while still moving the story forward. What you’re looking for is alignment: character, pressure, plot. When those three work together, the story feels alive and intentional.

Does This Character Turn Actually Serve The Story?

If you’re not sure whether a character turn is useful, write this sentence: “When my character tries to ________, this new choice forces ________, which reveals ________.”

That tiny check can tell you a lot. If the surprise creates pressure and reveals something true, keep exploring. If it only creates detours (no forced choices, no revelations), you may be drifting.

A surprise is worth keeping if it deepens the central story. If instead it keeps opening brand-new doors your novel does not have time to walk through, consider cutting it. Watch for side plots that belong to another book, and emotional complexity that never turns into choice. Keep asking: what does this discovery change in the next scene?

Once you understand your character more clearly, earlier scenes may also need a light touch-up. Not a full rewrite (take heart). Just enough so that the sharper version of the character feels present from the start. You’re not changing the whole draft. You’re creating continuity.

Ready to Give Your Story a Shape?

When a character surprises you, you might feel like abandoning your outline, but your outline isn’t the enemy. Outlines provide the structure that helps you tell the difference between a surprise that deepens your book and a detour that quietly stretches it into something unmanageable. 

If you don’t have an outline yet, or if the one you started with stopped working months ago, I strongly suggested you sign up for my free From Ideas to Outline challenge, running July 27 to 30. Over four 45-minute live Zoom sessions, you’ll go from a vague idea to a solid working outline, and learn several different methods you can try so that you can find the one that fits how your brain works.

Your characters are getting more interesting. That means you’re doing something right. Keep going.

It’s Pub Day! Sit Write Here: 6 Mindfulness Practices to Help You Write More and Suffer Less

After years of dreaming about this moment, the book is on the shelves! Sit Write Here: 6 Mindfulness Practices to Help You Write More and Suffer Less is here. In bookstores. In readers' hands. Real. This book offers six mindfulness practices for … [Continue reading] about It’s Pub Day! Sit Write Here: 6 Mindfulness Practices to Help You Write More and Suffer Less