Let’s pretend that you have just joined a professional writers’ group. After attending a few meetings, you ask a member for feedback about your book or short story.

Be prepared for it to come back with some critical observations.

We are full of expectations that all readers will enjoy our just finished work and tell us how stellar it is.

That daydream quickly dissolves into hard reality when we get our first assessment back, and it isn’t what we thought we would hear.

Perhaps the reader noticed those massive info dumps, long paragraphs we thought were so important to the why and wherefore of things.

Worse, perhaps they were familiar with horses (or medicine, or police procedure). Maybe they told us that we have it all wrong, that we need to do more research and then rewrite what we thought was the perfect novel.

Our unrealistic belief that our work…