What I Learnt from Writing (and abandoning) my First Novel

I have yet to actually use this blog as, you know, a blog. So, an update. I made this website around the time I was starting to query my first novel, ‘The Judge Itinerant’ to agents. In hindsight I probably jumped the gun on that a little - I was young, six months ago - and queried before I was ready. I did revise my query letter after realising all the rookie errors I had made with it, but only sent out the revised package to a couple of agents. In total, then, I received a series of rejections - which I am not surprised by as a) my initial query was not great, b) I didn’t submit to too many agents in total anyway, and c) I’m not entirely happy with the book, especially the beginning.

Indeed, most of my revisions focused on the first third of the novel. Yet, still, I couldn’t punch it up enough for even my own satisfaction, never mind someone else’s. So, after a few months seriously in the query trenches, and a few months vaguely thinking that I would re-revise and query again to a new batch of agents, I’ve decided to shelve the project. I might rewrite it in future but right now it is beyond my skill to save and, more importantly, I am having a lot of fun and am much happier with my second novel, ‘A Diplomat of Vascasia’ (I’m not good at titles, okay) which I started outlining back in July and started writing in late August. I currently have a pretty comprehensive outline that I am still tinkering with and the first five chapters plus a short prologue, amounting to some 22k words. The whole thing should end up being 21 chapters and about 90k words. Overall it is coming together really well and, as a bonus, seems to fit much better into the fantasy fiction marketplace than did my last project. I am planning to have the first draft of it finished by February, ideally earlier.

So, that’s the big ticket item. I am putting my first novel to the side and putting all my efforts into my second. I think that, to memorialise the thing and show what I mean by the awkward beginning, I’ll post chapter one of that book on this website as my short story for November. No, that’s not just a cop out so I can get out of writing a short story for the month and instead focus entirely on the novel. I mean, it’s partially a cop out, but not just a cop out. If anyone has any interest in reading the rest, I don’t want to put the whole thing online but I’m more than happy to email it over if you can find a way to get in contact.

Putting aside this thing that I worked on for about two years (longer than I intended but then I was writing my master’s thesis and it simultaneously for much of the first draft, so I have an excuse) is of course sad. But really my overwhelming emotion is excitement for what is coming next - for this current novel and all the ones after that I can’t wait to get to. And, most importantly, this ‘trunk novel’ taught me oh so much about writing in general and my writing in particular. So, I am going to take the rest of this blog post to talk about all that.

First and most importantly, this novel taught me that I love writing. Having a story in my head, tinkering with it, and then seeing it on the page are all things I could not imagine stopping doing at this point. There is something so satisfying about seeing the wordcount rise; feeling like progress is being made on this huge project (any novel, as far as I am concerned, is a huge project). I truly cannot envision a world in which I stop writing, even if I never get published. It is just far too much fun. And that liberated me - I still want to publish, but I understand why I am doing this beyond wanting to be paid for it: because I love it, and will continue to love it no matter what. As far as lessons go, that was by far the most crucial.

Next, it taught me to outline. I started the novel on a whim - I free-wrote the first chapter after having a few ideas condense into this concept for a novel - and outlined only after the first few chapters were finished. Even then, my outline was insufficient compared to what I am doing now. A few sentences for each chapter, telling me what should be in it but nothing more specific. I realised as I wrote that I work best with much more extensive outlines. Not knowing precisely what comes next leads me to stare at the screen doing nothing. With a more comprehensive outline, I write both faster and better. If you are a writer having similar problems, maybe a more detailed outline would work for you too.

Prose! Putting 120,000 words together for the first time, re-reading and thinking about the words you used and why, there is just no way that your prose couldn’t improve. Now, I don’t think I am the greatest prose writer to ever live, and the style I am going for in the novels set in this shared world is intentionally a little stilted to reflect the time, but when I look at where I started and finished with this novel, a world of improvement is obvious. I can now look at a sentence and quickly identify the flab - the unnecessary words, the fillers, the weak verbs, what have you. I can play with phrasing in a way I could not before. I have a much better feel for flow and word choice. Ultimately, ‘prose goodness’ is an immeasurable quality that all writers are always trying to improve, and I am no exception, but I no longer think of my prose as a weakness of my writing and, when I compare it to published work, I think I can hold my own.

One of the most important things I had to learn, and the hardest, was to take critique. As I wrote, I was showing my stuff to friends and getting feedback. I also started posting some of my stuff online for critique. Oh boy was that hard and learning not to take critical feedback poorly is a constant battle. Learning to detach yourself from your work, learning to recognise that just because someone found a few problems doesn’t mean the whole thing is awful, oh lord is it tough. I thought I would be fine with critique - I have had critique on essays, for example, but fiction feels so much more personal, it is so much more difficult to detach yourself from it. Yet, through pure exposure, I think I have finally got to the point where I can take feedback well and implement it constructively. It was a battle to get here, but here I am. In fact, that attempt to detachment my work from myself - me as a writer from me as a person - is part of why I decided to go by my initials as a writer rather than my full name. Ben Clarke is a guy with feelings and a personal life. B. A. Clarke is a faceless author persona. (that and the domain name was available.)

And lastly, character. Arcs are hard, alright. As someone who had only ever outlined and wrote beginnings or short stories before this, I had obviously never actually written out a full novel length character arc. With all those words, deciding what should happen when to push the character in X direction so they can have Y revelation is one of the most difficult things, at least for me, in a novel. I also have a tendency to make my characters fixed points rather than malleable elements of the story and, while that is fine for some characters, it can’t be every character. They need to grow, to move, as the story does. Outlining more has helped me on the first point, but I still find character to be the thing I prefer to discovery-write a little more. Overall, I am still working on my character writing but I think I have improved dramatically from when I started my first novel.

So, that is what I learnt. I am still working on my craft and always will be, but this first novel taught me a lot and improved my writing immensely. I hope to take these lessons into my future projects and learn some new ones as I go. One last thing: I have started using Critique Circle to get some more feedback so maybe look out for me there (prologue and first chapter of the new book are going up there this coming Wednesday) and, as mentioned, look out for the first chapter of ‘The Judge Itinerant’ dropping at the start of November.