Wining about Writing

Forty plums, a massive bucket, yeast, and three pounds of sugar can produce four bottles of sweet, delicious plum wine. I’ve done this from using plums from my plum tree in my yard. It doesn’t really take much by way of ingredients. But how many people would know how to combine these to create a drinkable wine?

Novel writing is like that. You take a stack of paper, a pen, and that’s basically all you need to write a novel. But if you hand all of that to the first person you meet at happy hour or in your economics class, you’re probably not going to get that novel you’re looking for: not even if they actually do try to write one. Why not?