4 Lessons I Learned from Writing My First Novel

Almost a year ago, I fulfilled a longtime ambition: I finished a complete draft of my first novel.

Writing my first novel was an incredible experience in many ways. It included soaring highs and staggering lows, and a lot of days where I plodded along and hoped to put down enough words with enough creativity to keep going.

I started the draft itself in about spring of 2016 and finished it in August of 2018, but I had attempted and failed to complete two previous drafts already. Overall, getting to that completed third draft was a little over a five and a half year process.

I learned a lot of lessons from this experience. I’d like to share a few.

Lesson 1: The Magic Always Comes Back

I mentioned above that I had some difficult times writing the novel. I’d like to share one in particular, because in all honesty I think it was my very worst, most unpleasant time in this whole process.

During the fall of 2016, I was dealing with a very heavy workload which compromised my sleeping schedule. I have always been a night owl, and when I’m dealing with a lot of work I tend to stay up very late, get up late, and then repeat the vicious cycle.

Do you know how unappetizing it is to sit down to breakfast after 3:00, 4:00, even 5:00? Merely writing it makes me feel icky inside.

Between being overworked, keeping very bad hours, and still being fatigued (surprise, surprise!), my personal life suffered. I did not have enough time for friends. I also dealt with some online dating blues around this time.

As you might guess, I struggled profoundly with a lack of creativity during this period of time. I did not feel like writing. I was tired, and every day was a slog.

The scene I was working on had a funny parallel to my life. I was, and remain, a runner, and I was writing a scene in which my protagonist was involved in an initiation rite which entailed running under grueling conditions.

My daily running sessions certainly felt particularly grueling, and the scene I was trying to write was such a funny parallel with how I felt about life that it was somehow almost perfect… in a really grueling, unpleasant, kill-me-now sort of way.

And yet, somehow, I kept scraping along, often writing little more than a couple of sentences. It was like this for perhaps a few weeks, maybe a month or so — it’s hard to be certain now. At the time, it felt like forever.

One day, the magic returned. Suddenly, I was writing with a sense of thrill and joy, the words flowing out of me like floodwaters on dry ground (so a rainstorm in Arizona, basically).

Lesson learned: keep plugging away, keep asking questions about what you are writing and why, and the magic will come back. The magic always comes back.

Lesson 2: You Have to Be in Love

I definitely think that a key aspect of why I finished the third draft but not the first two was that I learned from the first two, and did a better job creating an overall story arc.

Another difference that stands out in my mind: I learned to fall in love with my story, my characters, and my world. Instead of burning out, I was enthusiastic about this project right up until the very end.

How, you ask? I have some difficulty answering that even to myself.

I think, though, that I had to learn to focus on what attracted me to this story in the first place.

My vision changed over the course of five and a half years, of course, but I always had a vision, a reason I was passionate enough about this story to spend all that time trying to tell it.

This wasn’t solely a big-picture, whole-novel thing: I was very excited about certain scenes and certain arcs in the novel, because they developed certain things, or allowed things to happen, that I was really excited about.

In the 450-plus pages of the third draft, I wrote scenes of battle, forbidden love, encounters between cultures, and wilderness survival.

I’ll be the first to state that the whole thing was rough, but I have absolutely no shame about how much I loved it. And for all that there were painful periods, when it was fun, it was really fun.

I don’t think I could have gotten through that third draft if I wasn’t in love with the project.

If this is something you’re having trouble with, try going back to the basics. What attracted you to your story in the first place? A sense of wonder and excitement? A desire to tell a great story? An abiding passion for a character and their story arc? What?

Fall in love, and you’ll be able to muscle through the difficult times and complete your first novel. It’s an incredible lesson I can’t recommend highly enough.

Lesson 3: For the Love of God, Finish It

Another lesson I had to learn: finish your first novel, no matter what.

Yes, it’s going to be hideously imperfect and malformed. Guess what? That’s every single first complete draft ever.

Have you heard that you shouldn’t edit when you’re writing? The purpose of that lesson is to keep you from getting bogged down in endless edits and re-edits of your first chapter, or your first five chapters.

This is something they cover in more than one episode of Writing Excuses (and there are 14 seasons, all very worthwhile). It doesn’t matter how polished you can get that first chapter, for the love of God, finish the novel!

I don’t expect you to take my word for any of this, but it’s probably a good idea to plan on at least five drafts of your novel.

Lesson 4: Know When to Move On

I had good reasons for finishing my novel. And yet, within a short time after finishing it, I decided to put it aside.

“Breaking up is hard to do,” as the song goes, and there’s still a bittersweet twinge for me, nearly a year later, as I contemplate a future without this world and these characters I spent so much of my life on.

By the end of the third draft — the only complete draft — the deficiencies in the whole thing were fairly glaring. I wanted to take a break anyway, and although I planned to come back to it and write a fourth draft, I soon developed a keen interest in writing short fiction.

Soon after the novel, I wrote a short story set in the same world. It proved an enjoyable exercise, so I took the next step: I planned and wrote a short story set in an entirely different world.

I was hooked. Writing short stories in other worlds was not only a fun, different challenge, it also forced me to innovate and get better and take risks. As I read short fiction, studying the form and seeing what other authors did, I can say with some confidence that I started to become a better writer.

As of this writing, I have completed seven short stories — roughly, in about the 7,500-word to 12,000-word range — since the novel. I am working on an eighth.

The stories I am writing now are not stories I could have written a year ago, because I was not yet in the correct headspace: I hadn’t learned enough and grown enough.

My plan is certainly to write another novel, but most likely this will be in my main new setting, a fantasy space opera where divine manifestations power advanced technology and constructed afterlives. It’s tons of fun, although I’ve also written in other settings.

I think if I had gone back to the novel and written a fourth draft, it would have been significantly better, but still a long ways from the level of mastery and craftsmanship I would need for it to be the hit I always wanted it to be.

On the plus side, now I get to write better stories. For all of these reasons and more, I’m grateful for my time with my first novel.

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Writing Updates:

Current work-in-progress:

Short story “The Oracle’s Mercy”, dark fantasy/futuristic

A young woman seeks immortality and the blessing of a goddess of dreams and fate, risking an encounter with an oracle known for demanding a peculiar price: to be allowed to eat those who would otherwise suffer a worse misfortune.

Most recent complete draft:

Short story “The Man in the Miracle”, fantasy space opera

When a miracle-toting demigod appears in a well-guarded afterlife created by a carefully-scripted divine manifestation, potentiality-scripter Ellibassi Ottondal and her companion-spirit and friends find themselves facing a bigger fight than they bargained for.

Submission status:

Short story “The Implacable One”, dark fantasy/Weird West — 2 rejections, 1 current submission

Pursued across an inhospitable desert planet by a dark elemental storm-god, a frontier military commander and his men must decide whether to trust a captured bandit rumored to have a mysterious connection with the entity known as the Implacable One.