The First Novel
The first novel. Seems like a truly insurmountable task. Writing a whole book takes a lot of work and commitment. It sounds exciting, grandiose, but even though you’ve poured your soul into that first novel, a lot of the time it doesn’t pan out as you expect it to, and that’s exactly why you should write it.
How do you even write that first novel? I’d say it’s like swimming. You can read every book on swimming, and watch every video, but you won’t be able to swim until you jump into the water yourself. But you can make that water just a bit easier to swim in. There are different ways you can approach your first novel.
You can research everything, and I mean everything on writing, before jumping in and writing. But I believe that will restrict your creativity, because, while there are rules to writing, you can only write a truly memorable novel by breaking some of them. If you follow everything that those writing books tell you to you might write a structurally good book and realistic characters. But how will it stand out? The story will be a jack of all trades and a master of none. It will be like a good, reliable, but mind-numbingly boring car. You can’t write like you work in a factory. You write like you’re an artist, because you are.
Another possible approach is just going in blind. Not much to say about this, you had an idea and you just jumped straight into it. While not ideal, I believe this would work better than the previous option, but it is far from perfect. While not limiting your creativity, this approach can and probably will bite you in the ass, because there are no limits to what you write, the story will get away from you. It’s very easy to lose sight of where you’re going when there are no rules.
Like many things in life, the best lies in balance between the absolutes. You take the best of both worlds, and do some research, while not letting it get to you too much. You write what you want, how you want, but have a structure to it. Have your story in a cage, but don’t be afraid to break down a few bars if needed.
Now that you’re actually writing, you will start expecting things of yourself and your work. Well, don’t.
You should manage your expectations. I knew that when going into writing my first novel. I knew it probably won’t be this great novel that I imagined in my head. And yet, I had the full intent of committing to it until it was ‘good’, and then trying my luck with querying it, and hopefully getting somewhere. I haven’t touched the fourth draft in over a year. I got stuck on the very ending, and shelved it. In the span of this year I didn’t write much. I wrote a seventy page dystopian novella (blog posts coming about that), and that’s the only project that I can count as pretty good work, but I digress. Writing your first novel can have all kinds of conclusions for your own story as an aspiring writer. I’ve read of people fully giving up on writing after one novel, some people became obsessed with writing after their first novel. For me the conclusion of writing my first novel was burnout. I loved writing my first novel. I hated it when I realized that this is the best I can do right now, and it’s not good enough. I still strongly believe that my first novel has the most potential out of everything else I’ve written. None of the stories that I try to write right now compare to it.
Rare are the cases where the first novel actually starts an author’s career. There’s no telling if you’re gonna be the next big author, so go ahead, write. It’s a game of roulette, and you can bet as much as you want, the thing is every bet costs your own blood, sweat, and tears.
