The Fluency Gap
Why Writing Feels Harder Than It Should
⋙ Writing Feels Like Cooking in an Unfamiliar Kitchen ⋘
Imagine you’re cooking dinner, but you’re not in your own safe, reliable, well-organized kitchen. You fool! Why did you volunteer to cook dinner at your friend’s house? You were hoping to impress them with your lamb and blue cheese ravioli, and nothing is where you expect it to be. The pasta strainer isn’t in the corner cabinet where it should be. You open every drawer, searching for a spatula only to find it hanging from a hook above the stove (okay, that makes sense). You’re trying to make ravioli, but instead of focusing on cooking, you’re wasting time looking for basic tools.
You don’t feel stupid—just frustrated. And now you’re insulting your friend and not making a good impression at all.
Why is this even in the oven? What kind of knuckle-dragging ape-shaped man-baby stores a colander in the broiler rack? Are you insane?
Sorry, Phil. My bad. Let’s just enjoy our slightly overcooked ravioli.
Writing can feel the same way. You’ve read countless books on craft, analyzed the canonical great novels of lit-er-a-ture, and absorbed all the advice on dialogue, conflict, pacing, and subtext that can be stuffed into a brain-shaped sponge. You know what good writing looks like. But when you sit down to write, the experience is plodding, slow, effortful, and infuriating. You recognize something isn’t working, but fixing it feels like searching for that hide-and-seek pasta strainer—under those conditions you don’t have the fluency to execute smoothly.
Many of us give up on cooking altogether. And by cooking I mean writing. And by writing I mean writing in very specific contexts.
This isn’t because you “lack talent” or because there’s some mysterious “taste gap.” It’s simply a fluency gap—a disconnect between what you know about writing and what your writing skills can execute effortlessly. This is knowledge of writing which you can only acquire through experience.
You’re trying to cook a souffle but the only cake you’ve ever baked came in a box labeled Betty Crocker.
⋙ Why This Happens
Writing is a complex skill made up of many micro-skills:
Write dialogue that moves the story forward
Create characters with agency and flaws
Balance subtext, conflict, and character motivation
Structure sentences effectively for reader interpretation
Oh, my!
When you read great fiction or even just good stories, these things feel obvious. It’s like seeing or eating a finished cake where someone forgot an ingredient—you’d notice that immediately. I mean, how does somebody forget the flour? But knowing what good writing looks like isn’t the same as being fluent in executing it. If you’re trying to juggle too many unfamiliar writing skills at once, you overload your brain, and the experience of writing feels exhausting rather than fun or even mildly satisfying.
And that can lead to avoidance, especially if you think something is missing from your toolkit. You might go in search of the very thing that is overloading your brain: knowledge about writing.
This is why reading about writing can sometimes make the problem worse—your knowledge keeps growing, but fluency hasn’t caught up. It’s like adding more ingredients to your meal before you even know where the whisk is. That’s whisky business.
⋙ The Solution: Focused, Constrained Practice
The way to bridge the fluency gap isn’t to learn more theory—it’s to write in a way that allows you to attune to the skills of writing, piece by piece, bit by bit. “Bird by bird,” as Anne Lamott’s dad once said.
This is where constrained writing exercises come in. (Yes, I’m selling something here. But don’t worry, it’s free and for your own benefit.) Instead of sitting down to “write a great story”, focus on one small, adaptable skill at a time—like learning where the colander is before you boil the water for the ravioli.
Each exercise gives you:
✅ A setup (so you know where to start)
✅ A clear goal (what you’re trying to accomplish)
✅ Constraints (to keep cognitive load manageable)
By isolating a specific aspect of writing and practicing it in a focused way, you develop fluency faster—so that when you sit down to write a full story, those micro-skills happen automatically rather than requiring conscious effort.
Writing isn’t about storing a bunch of knowledge and pulling it out when needed. It’s about becoming attuned to the act of writing itself—until finding the right words feels as natural as reaching for a colander in your own kitchen, right there nestled in the “big” cooking pot.
Wait, what do you mean? “That’s not where I keep the colander.” Are you insane?
Never mind, sorry about that. Let’s just press the button to subscribe and we can sit down together and do some daily writing exercises, okay?
