When your writing is good

But your manuscript isn't

Writers are told to ‘follow the heat,’ which sounds exciting until you realise nobody’s actually told you what heat is.

For years, I thought it lived in sentences.

Good sentences feel like heat because they’re immediately rewarding.
Maybe they’re funny, or have a pleasing rhythm, or contain an image that captures something exactly right.

The quality feels like proof that you’re on the right track (and your brain immediately updates your projected publication timeline).

Early on, that proof is real. You are getting better... at writing good sentences.

Sentence-level heat has a flaw that takes a long time to notice.

You can write a thousand brilliant, excellent sentences you love and still have a manuscript that doesn’t land.

You can stack lovely vignettes upon scenes full of tension and settings that sing, and your book can still feel oddly flat, as if it’s been beautifully decorated but never actually built.

That’s because sentence heat is pleasure without direction.

It rewards you immediately, but offers no guidance about what the work needs next.

Conceptual heat on the other hand, is less flattering and more demanding.

It’s the part of a manuscript that feels important before it’s intelligible.

This kind of heat complicates a project instead of smoothing it out.

It’s not a dead idea you’re sentimental about, but a live one that keeps insisting on being there, even after you’ve tried to be sensible and cut it.

Early in a writing career, heat feels stylistic because language is where improvement shows up first. Later, heat becomes conceptual.

You no longer need proof that you can write a good sentence, what matters is what the sentence is in service of.

Conceptual heat doesn’t reward you immediately and it’s harder to explain and harder to trust and easier to remove... But that’s the test.

If you take it out and the manuscript suddenly feels cleaner and more straightforward, but also thinner and less alive, you’ve probably found (and just removed) the heat.

Happy writing,

Katherine