10 Things I Learned From Writing My First Novel | Part 1

Which you could probably find anywhere, but admit it, you kinda wanted to get them from me.

This actually started out as an entirely different post. A whopping 3 of my 6 SurveyMonkey respondents said they’d like me to start a series on Anxiety and the Writing Life, but I’m realizing that even that first post is going to take a lot more time and attention before it says what I want it to say. For those waiting on that (highly personal) series to start, don’t worry—I plan to have the first installment out next week. In the meantime, enjoy my feet-dragging as I present you with

X Number of Lessons I learned From Writing My First Novel (Where X = the number of ideas I have before I get tired)

As you may have picked up—either from my last newsletter, or because you were on Slack when the triumphant moment arrived—I recently finished drafting my first novel. Ever.

This both is, and is not, an exceedingly misleading thing to say.

I’ve been writing for a long time. We’ll say I started seriously in 2001, when K. A. Applegate published the final book of the Animorphs series and it was so astonishingly, soul-crushingly wrong and bad to my 11-year-old mind that my mom helped me draft a letter to the author telling her how wrong and bad she’d been. Applegate was very generous with me; she typed me a sobering note about how stories have minds of their own, and oftentimes an author feels responsible to communicate that life is hard and not all stories have happy endings. She was sorry she’d disappointed me, but also glad that her decisions moved me the way they did. Maybe, if I kept that kind of sensitivity, I could be an author too, one day.

I didn’t appreciate a word of that because I was in fifth grade and she’d done my boy Tobias dirty by killing his girlfriend right in front of him so no shit I was gonna be an author and I was gonna be a whole hell of a lot better than K. A. Applegate.

I proceeded to rip off Animorphs. It was great, full of aliens and original characters (do not steal). I planned like 12 books, including a Jurassic Park crossover. I think I wrote like…a chapter?

It was my first of many experiences with Not Getting Shit Done. Several similar projects followed, including a few Warhammer 40,000 fan-fics that never went deeper than a chapter or two. Then, when I was 12 or 13, I picked up the first English issue of Shonen Jump from a Kroger around the corner and life lit the hell up.

Honestly, I think my first real lessons in plot and pacing came from those manga—and all the endless anime I watched with my cousin during the summers. Not the best teachers, but I learned the material elements of telling a story: placing things on the page, developing characters and tension, keeping a reader wanting more. I also learned, through attempted emulation, that I couldn’t draw for shit. Still, I could focus on the story parts while I honed my chops. I never did learn to draw very well, but by the time I abandoned the project in high school I had an 80 page “script” of sorts for a Yu Yu Hakusho knock-off about a kid who goes into a coma and fights monsters and his own demons! from inside his dreams, realizing he can physically teleport throughout the physical world by navigating the dreamscape.

By the end of college—with several bad short stories and a few more failed (read: barely attempted) novels under my belt, I decided to unearth that “script” and transform it into a soft sci-fi gang story about genetically modified thieves. The concept—which I called Jotun because I was so goddamn into melodic deathmetal at the time—is an interesting one, and I hope to return to it eventually. By the time I graduated in 2012, I had three and a half “light novels” that I turned in for my creative writing class, a project totaling somewhere in the ballpark of 75,000 words.

This was the closest I’d ever gotten to finishing anything—but it was still only half the story I intended to tell. I continued to have false starts up to and through grad school, starting a half-dozen more novels but only ever finishing short stories. As my ambition continued to grow, and I realized this pattern had to change: I needed to finish a long-form piece of fiction if I was going to call myself a writer, in the way I meant it.

I proved such volume was possible when I wrote my PhD dissertation, which clocked in at over 90,000 words. To keep myself sane during that process, I also started writing Fitzcarraldo: a fantasy novel about a pirate with a Robin Hood heart who realizes that a Robin Hood lifestyle is a lot harder than he imagines it to be—especially with an ancient blood curse bubbling up in him as he comes of age. (It’s also named after a song named after a film.) I intended it as a 50,000 word NaNoWriMo project, got 30,000 words in before realizing I needed to start all over, crossed the 50,000 word mark before shelving it so I could finish my dissertation, and finally, just before Valentine’s Day this year, I realized I’d come close to a workable draft of a fantasy debut at 98,953 words. I wasn’t happy with it, by any stretch, but it was done. I’d finished a thing—front to back, beginning to end.

And now that I’ve gotten my goddamn biography out of the way, Here’s what I learned:

1. Think of the “Bad Book” as a form of de-risking.

This video spawned a little-viewed Reddit post, but I’ve seen the advice in a thousand other places and ultimately took it seriously: Your first book will be bad.

When authors offer this advice, it’s usually a way of lowering expectations. Don’t think you can write a best-seller out of the gate. Don’t think your first or even third draft can go right to a publishing house. Hone your craft, pay your dues, do your apprenticeship.

This advice means different things to different people, but I took it in a harder direction. I decided, up front: I will not publish this novel.

I had a few reasons for this, but the big one was not wanting to compete with my own ego while I learned something new about my craft. If I’d written the book I really wanted to write, I would have infected my process with all sorts of delusions and probably missed some important lessons along the way.

As it stands, Fitzcarraldo might be called “Episode 1.5” of the larger fantasy series I want to publish and, ultimately, build my career on. It’s a sub-episode in the larger storyboard; a series of events that take place between my projected “Book 1” and “Book2.” Fitzcarraldo doesn’t have to be published for those stories to make sense, but could very well add to them one day. That wider world is 10+ years in the making, and I owe those stories a more honed set of talents than I currently have. Being an important but ultimately unnecessary part of those stories, Fitzcarraldo was my decision to become worthy of that larger task, and to “de-risk” future attempts at something which I very much want to succeed.

That’s my re-interpretation of the common advice: if you have larger writerly aspirations, then accepting the reality of the “bad first book” can become part of a larger, more proactive strategy of de-risking your dream projects and becoming the artist who is worthy of completing those visions.

2. Don’t buy a bunch of writing books.

I used a bunch of strategies to get words on the page in a way that made something near to sense. I actively tried to minimize the amount of total overhaul I’d need to do in the future, and so I sought out different formulas for writing and plotting that might help me discover my own path. I was also fully willing to be told that there was a one great and holy rule that led to getting things done and I needed to be unpretentious about it. To this end, I bought a load of books to help show me the way, including Take Off Your Pants! by Libbie Hawker (it’s a book about outlining, you pervert) and How to Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method by Randy Ingermanson. I link them here for anyone who wants to follow up, but I’m telling you now… I wish I hadn’t spent the money.

The fact is, you can learn any novel-writing formula—including the “Snowflake Method” (TM) by hearing about it second-hand and then trying it out for yourself to see how it works. You don’t need eight bucks and a few hours reading things you ought to just be putting into practice. Having been a “Pantser” all my life, I realized I wouldn’t get this book done without learning to be a Plotter (especially after needing to scrap 30,000 words, but more on that below). I didn’t need a book to tell me this, I just needed to do the work. At some point, I also found myself using the Snowflake Method by total accident just because it made sense and was useful at the time; I’d probably read 10 pages of the book I’d spent $5 on.

Now, I’m no philistine; I will sing the praises of books on the craft until the day I die. I am eternally grateful for Stephen King’s On Writing and a friend’s gift of R. O. Butler’s From Where You Dream. But at some point you will study your way through things you could have—and should have—learned through practice… And you might spend a small fortune in the meantime.

3. Being a “Plotter” or a “Pantser” doesn’t matter.

Proceeding from the above, “Plotting versus Pantsing” is one of the oldest—and most pointless—debates in the writing world. Do you write “by the seat of your pants,” discovering the story as you go and smoothing the edges later? Or do you build a tightly-constructed outline first and never deviate from it as you fill in the details and add flesh to your narrative bones.

Here’s my take: I really don’t care. You shouldn’t either. You probably already don’t.

The fact is that each project is different, each project will get us stuck in different ways, and we will inevitably use some inconsistent combination of tools to get ourselves un-stuck and finish the damn thing. In toto, my process ends up looking a lot like Brandon Sanderson’s.

It’s all just tools in the tool belt. Don’t worry about “what kind of writer” you are when you should be worrying about what kind of tools you present project is likely to need… And then be ready to change-out your took box to make sure the job gets done.

4. It’s actually possible to “draft clean.”

“Drafting clean” is another of those mythical things that writers talk about that makes us not like them. Honestly though, it’s a matter of preference and what gets you to the end of your project. By the time I finished Fitzcarraldo, I was consistently putting in 800+ words per night; that’s slow compared to a lot of other writers, but I was also looping back and looking at what I’d just written and cleaning it up a bit as I went, or making notes of things that would need to change later. I like making as little work for myself as possible.

This also means I’m inordinately attached to my first drafts, which is an emotional habit I still need to break. “Drafting clean” does not mean that you are done after the first draft, it means your draft isn’t riddled with place-holders and tags like, “ADD NARRATION TO DIALOGUE” or, “INSERT SOME SEXUAL TENSION HERE.” I guess I’m trying to say it’s okay to try and make your first draft as good as you can make it—if that helps you.

One helpful process involved sharing chapters of the novel with someone else as they were completed. My friend Josh was writing a novel at the same time, and we agreed to load things into Google Docs so we each had a reader following along as the projects unfolded, getting a beta-read in real time. This meant I was frequently looking back over my first drafts and buffing them until I was no longer ashamed before sending them to Josh, who would often make me feel ashamed anyway—but not without giving me a lot of hope and confidence, too. This meant the drafting process was slow going, as I often went back to edit passages that Josh said didn’t work. But it also meant that newer chapters got written on a much more solid foundation of finished work. Eventually, I had to abandon that process in order to actually finish the work—I had to know when to put one useful tool back into the toolbox. But I would still recommend to anyone that they at least try this way of doing things, and I look forward to doing it again.

5. Screwing the pooch isn’t the end of the world.

This entry has already gone long, so I’ll end with this one and bring you five more lessons next week. But this is a really big one:

It’s okay to mess up.

Somewhere around the 30,000 word mark, I realized this whole novel was going to hell. The character perspectives and motivations weren’t making sense, and I realized I had to entirely revise the characters’ relationships to one another and, thus, their motivations for what they were doing. This involved gutting pretty much everything I’d already done up to that point and starting over.

And you know what? It wasn’t all that bad. According to David Madden in Revising Fiction, the third “step” (of four) in becoming a really good writer is making mistakes and being confident that you can fix them (p.11). I didn’t just realize something was wrong at 30,000 words—I realize what was wrong, and what would keep me from finishing. I wasn’t starting over blind; I was starting over with a plan. Better yet, I was so sure the plan would work that the rewrite ended up being a breeze.

Okay, so there’s 5 Things I Learned From Writing My First Novel. As I said, this post would include as many ideas as I could get down before I got tired, but I actually have five more to go. This will conclude Part 1, and I’ll give you Part 2 next week. Get ready, ‘cause we’re going to get all existential up in here in preparation for the new series on Anxiety and the Writing Life. In the meantime, I hope you had fun with these—and I hope you think of a few people you’d be happy to share with. Please do.