In April of 2020 I wrote my first book. By May, I was done. I was pulling 5,000 word days, scrawling ideas on a whiteboard, I’d think of a plot in the morning and write it in the afternoon. It took 6 weeks. At the time, it was thrilling, I was telling myself I was gonna be a published novelist by my mid-20s. I was already shopping which publisher I wanted to use. For half a year, I had a tab open to the Pegasus publishing open submission page, because this book needed to get out into the world.

Right after it was edited.

My first book was a complicated thing. It tried to walk the thin line of a story about people summoning demons, revenge, power politics, and a bunch of witchcraft. And those were supposed to be the good guys. In retrospect, I think the book has good bones, but I didn’t have the skills to tell it.

The first sign something was wrong was when I started editing. Every chapter needed work, every paragraph had to be rewritten. I was basically rebuilding the book from scratch, but when I looked at the second draft, the quality still wasn’t there.

The nail in the coffin was when I shared it with my Mom. This is a kind lady who always finds the positive in things, and she was eager to read it! In preparation for her notes, I told myself she’s gonna say a lot of nice things, but I’d need to keep an ear open for opportunities to improve.

When she got back to me, she only had one note. “There wasn’t a lot of emotion in the book”.

That may not sound that bad, but notes on creative endeavors are weird. If you get a bunch of small, nit-picky notes on moments and characters, it’s a good thing. It’s a sign your reader followed the story and was invested in it. A note telling you your story has no emotion means your reader had no investment. A death sentence for the work.

In the year since, I’ve spoken to other writers about their experiences. Turns out what I had done was a common occurrence. The first book is terrible. We call it the practice book, and I had written one doozy of a practice book.

Lesson 1: Don’t write in a vacuum

I was focussed on the end-goal. Get a book published, present at a conference, win awards. But it takes years to learn the fundamentals of good storytelling. Churning a book out doesn’t make you a better writer, it highlights what you’re already doing. Strengths and weaknesses. If I had been attending writer’s groups, if I had had an editor, if I had posted samples online, they might have caught my errors before I was finished.

They might have told me my first book shouldn’t have 7 POVs. They might have told me books are meant to live in the minds of the characters, not simply describe the sequence of events. They could have told me foreshadowing isn’t just a writer being clever, it’s essential for helping the reading process the events of the book.

Lesson 2: Keep it simple

The plot of my book was compared to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but not in a good way. Complex, deep characters being handled by a novice with the brush. The only story I had ever written was a hike through a Lovecraftian Jungle, the complexities of Hamlet were a bit more than I could handle. It should have been 100,000 words minimum. I had tried to do it in 52,000. 

It’s advice I’ve heard from film makers, game designers, novelists, and artists. The four-book epic can wait. Start with a story you know you can do well.

Lesson 3: Learn from others

I had a lot of hubris on my first go-around. Ambition is a great thing, but the story I was writing was unlike any other story I had ever read, which meant I was inventing it whole-cloth. If I had searched a little harder, read more deeply, analyzed a few more stories, I might have found a framework from which I could build out my story.

When I pitched my story to an editor, they said, oh it’s kind of like a Jurassic Park for demons. I wish I had heard that feedback before writing the book, because it clarified a lot of what I was trying to do. Some of the story beats in Jurassic Park would fit comfortably into my story and fixed a lot of the awkwardness with the characters. It even clarified what the theme of the story was, capturing demonic beasts was a whole lot like keeping Dinosaurs in a park, something that can only end in disaster, no matter how well-intentioned the characters were.

What I mean to say here is that I could have studied Jurassic Park for good story beats. I could have watched Constantine for a lesson on how to deal with angels and demons. I could have watched The Witch to really elevate the evil aspects. I could have taken notes from the best to better understand my own work.

Conclusion

It’s been five years since I wrote my first book. My second book took a little over a year, and my third book looks like it’ll take a little less than that. I talk to writers as much as I can. I keep my books simple. I read more these days. I put every lesson to practice.

I hope anyone reading this won’t be chased away from writing their first novel. It’s gonna be trouble, but thinking it’s gonna be great is a rite of passage. Write it anyway! Take some big swings! What’s the worst that could happen? For me, I’m just glad that such a painful lesson only took a couple of months to learn.

The fastest way to write your first good book is to write your bad book quickly.

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