January 25, 2021
How to Write Your First Book
Writing your first novel is a big deal. If you pardon the ridiculous metaphor, writing your first novel is not unlike the first time you slept with someone: It’s exciting, scary, fascinating, and – looking back – kind of special yet also pretty “meh”. The trick in learning how to write your first book lies in understanding what to expect.
But there’s more.
To continue the same symbolism, just as a new partner makes it feel like the very first time all over again, you might have written ten books, but you can still get the “writing my first book” experience all of a sudden. In other words, even if you have already written at least one book, this post applies to you too.
Drawing from my own long and sometimes painful experience, in this post I will give you some simple but useful tips on how to write your first book of fiction – whether it’s your literal first or the first book in a new beginning you want to be making.
The Peculiarities of “First Time”
As I mentioned in the introduction, “first times” (in writing books as well as personal relationships) can be peculiar things.
And now, I can’t help but quote from Illiterary Fiction an excerpt the ambiguity of which passed unnoticed by most readers – though hopefully not by you:
Paul remembers where the photo was taken; in a toy store, three days after they first met and a couple of hours before the first time they had sex. The phrase “first time” vibrates in his consciousness, painting his being with an indistinct emotion. Sometimes a first time is not really a first time, whereas sometimes it actually is…
The reason I remembered this – and decided to include it in a post on how to write your first book – is that “a first time” is a fluid concept.
By the time you have decided to write your first novel, you have certainly written tons of things, fiction and nonfiction alike. Some of them might be long texts – there are people who decide to write their first book of fiction having already written a university thesis.
Indeed, you might have already written books before, but you feel you’re ready for a new beginning – either because you haven’t written in a long time, or because you would like a new beginning.
To keep this as simple and useful as possible, I have divided my advice into two parts: do’s and dont’s. We’ll start with the latter, to get the… negativity out of the way, and then we’ll take a look at the stuff you can do to write your first book in a way that does it justice.
How to Write Your First Book: The Dont’s
Once again, may I repeat two things.
- These are lessons I learned myself the hard way, by banging my head against the proverbial wall.
- It all boils down to knowing what to expect.
It’s important to realize your experience is unique. In other words, be really careful when you try to see what others are doing. You might inadvertently become a cargo cult writer.
With these in mind, here is what you should avoid when you write your first book. I’ll give you three dont’s and three do’s.
No, It Won’t Be a Best-Seller
With the caveat that only an author can assess their own work, not only will your first book not be a best-seller, it won’t even be very good.
I laugh at it now, but when I wrote my first novel, before I even finished high school, I honestly believed publishers would beg me to have it published. I had an out-of-this-world plot idea (rather literally; it was fantasy), and I thought it was the most original thing ever written.
The truth is, as I’ve explained before, plot is not only overrated, but by placing your proverbial eggs in the basket of plot, you run the risk of overcomplicating things.
No, Your First Book Doesn’t Need Experience
By that, I mean neither life experience nor writing experience. Recently, on an exchange I had on LinkedIn, someone basically said they’d like to write a book, but they’re very young and feel it’s not “appropriate”.
As I told them, some of the most boring people I’ve ever met had decades of “experience”. The thing is, the only kind of experience you need as a writer is the ability to reflect on your world – and particularly your memories. Writing is a process related to imagination and creativity, which isn’t about quantified experience.
In other words, if you feel the need to write something, that’s all there is to it. You don’t need anything else.
No, Writing Your First Novel Isn’t Worth Sharing
This is probably an unorthodox piece of advice. You constantly hear people telling you to share your work – if not publishing it, at least offering it to friends and acquaintances – in order to get feedback.
Pointless.
I guarantee you, you won’t get any useful feedback from a general audience – and certainly not from friends. If you can find someone experienced, who knows what they’re doing, they can steer you in the right direction.
But when it comes to a general audience, they’ll be reading your book not as a first book (and likely a draft), but as a mature product. They will see shortcomings – unless, ironically enough, if they’re friends or relatives and are too blind – but they won’t be able to pinpoint what’s wrong with it.
The things is, sadly, general audiences don’t have the capacity to understand first books, and sometimes not even any kind of books. Keep your first book to your own self. I’m about to show you what to do, then, to figure things out.
How to Write Your First Book: The Do’s
Let’s do this in reverse order now: I’ll start from the last “don’t” and work backwards, attempting to offer you a counter-suggestion.
Yes, Your First Book Can Teach You
But you must learn the lesson directly. There can be no mediator in the form of a general audience, a feedback group, etc. Unless, as I mentioned, you can find a creative-writing specialist who can show you how, you have to rely on yourself.
After you finish the book, let it rest. Then go back to it as a reader and note what you liked and what you didn’t. Be critical but not harsh. Remember: Your first book is not a best-seller. At the same time, it’s not worthless either (more about it in a moment).
Yes, Writing a Book Improves Your Experience
If you are open-minded and willing to learn from your first book, it can teach you. Which, in turn, can increase your experience. I mean this in terms of both writing and life experiences.
That is to say, writing your first book can help you see what works and what doesn’t in terms of the craft. Ultimately, such experience amassed leads to developing an authorial voice.
However, it also means you become more experienced in terms of understanding how affect works in literature. To write your first book is to acquire a life experience that, in turn, can help you enrich your imaginative process and boost your ability to write better. It’s a self-feeding mechanism.
Yes, Even Your First Book Is Worth Something
Your first book might not be a best-seller (assuming you want to be a professional writer), or even very good. But it is still worth something.
Mind you, I don’t mean it simply as a teaching tool, as described above. I mean it in purely literary terms: Your first book has something worth developing or continuing.
That’s where reading it from a reader’s perspective is important. If you’re honest to yourself – neither excessively harsh nor naively admiring – you will find quality parts in it.
Perhaps you liked the way you managed to use beautiful but functional descriptions. Or maybe it’s the way you used foreshadowing. Or maybe it’s how you managed to create realistic, relatable characters.
Whatever it is, build on it.
A Twist in the Plot of How to Write Your First Book
There are no first books. There are no last ones, either. Or, if you’d rather see the flip side of it, all books are first books.
The truth is, there is never a truly “first book”, and there is never a “last one”. What I mean by that?
Literature, like all art, is a subjective, ambiguous process. Unlike math where you can solve an equation, a book is not something you finish; rather, you abandon it. You say “good enough” at some point, and consider it done.
And so, an important lesson to remember is, let your first book be your first book. Don’t try to rewrite it, don’t try to “finish” it. Above all, don’t think you need to cling onto the idea you had. Plots don’t matter, remember.
To write a first book is to express an instance of affect in a given period of time. There will always be a new experience, a new motive to write.
4 Comments
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I have written two novels so far and am working on the third. The first one started out as a short story – I was more ambitious the second time: I wrote a novella. Both were based on a philosophical truth and a plot idea that would carry those truths that I had learned in a lifetime. They were very important to me because someone had to write those truths and it might as well be me. I thought at the time of writing that the philosophical truth and the plot were original (at least I had not encountered them before) so I was properly motivated to develop them into full-size novels. I admit, I did not have the confidence to judge the quality of my own writing, so I constantly solicited feedback from two people I admire very much for their writing talent. The feedback I received encouraged me to keep writing, plus it helped me enormously to spot silly mistakes that I had made, due to my inexperience. I know the novels are not literary masterpieces but I am quite happy with them because I believe they express something important that I deeply believe in and that was my main reason for writing them. So, if some of the readers of this blog are a bit like me, intent on self-expression, rather than entertainment, my example should show one way of writing your first novel and the deep personal satisfaction you can glean from the experience.
Being humble and having empathy are great qualities to have in general, and that goes double for writing a novel. Thanks for your comment, Francis!
Great beginning to an article like this! Love it – and feel it :’D!
I’ve been browsing though some article at the moment, as I am in the process of writing a book (it more or less happened accidental, by writing a little story in the train, then writing another little scene on a hut in the mountains and so on and so on). I now have a collection of scenes, stories and ideas only loosely connected to each other. First I thought it would be amazing to put all the pieces together to create a real book – I was absolutely hyped, but lately I nearly had a break down, because it is quite hard to make a satisfying book out of all this material…I don’t expect (or need) it to become a bestseller, I just feel the thrive to put it all together, but I’d also wish to publish it sooner or later. When browsing for tips on the internet I also came across novum publishing, they do have some cool services for beginning authors that helped me really set up a goal (namely I want this book to be readable and published and sell at least one piece to someone I don’t have any connection with). That helped me get my stuff together and create a plan of how to write a book. So your article comes at the perfect time – thanks a lot!
You’re very welcome, best of luck in your future writing endeavors! 🙂