When I was twelve I figured I could easily write a novel. All I had to do was sit down, come up with a story idea, and then just write each thing in sequence as it happened. When I did this I was quickly disillusioned with the results, because while I could write a book-length story this way, I realized the final product would be phenomenally boring. My ideas weren’t super interesting and my command of language was far from vivid, but the biggest sticking point was that just writing one thing after another made for tedious reading. I could have dispassionately moved my characters from point A to point B. I could have done that for two or three hundred pages no problem. But I didn’t. Rachel Harrison did. And that’s the only difference between us as fiction writers.