Imagine a novice writer who has been working on their work for six months. Every morning, they take a sincere seat, open the document, go back to the work from the day before, and start reading it. then making changes to it. After that, polish it. The morning is over by the time they are somewhat content with those two pages. Nothing new has been written by them. Week after week, this pattern continues until no more files are opened. The book is always in a state of near-completion; it is polished in some areas and incomplete in others.
This is the most typical way that first novels fail, and it occurs so subtly that most authors are unaware of it until the momentum has been lost. It feels productive to edit while writing. It even has a sense of responsibility. Sentence by sentence, you are refining the work, ensuring that every page is strong before proceeding. The issue is that you are unsure of which pages will make it to the final draft. You’re creating attachment to words that might need to be completely removed, and you’re polishing scenes that might not exist in six months. Perhaps more first books have been killed by this impulse—the perfectionist’s need to make corrections before finishing—than by a lack of skill or inspiration.
Early in her career, Mary Adkins, a published novelist and writing coach who quit her job as a lawyer to write fiction, talks about running into this exact obstacle. After finishing her first draft and opening it for revision, she spent weeks changing specific sentences in scenes she wasn’t even sure would remain in the book. She required a structural revision that addressed the story’s coherence as a whole, the characters that were working, and the connections between the plot threads. She was making a cosmetic revision. In hindsight, the distinction seems clear. The urge to polish a poorly written paragraph is almost never more manageable than facing a manuscript’s larger format.
The solution is simple in theory but actually challenging in practice: complete the initial draft before making any edits. Write the entire thing, poorly if needed, and fight the urge to go back. The purpose of a first draft is to exist. It doesn’t have to be excellent. It must be finished because a finished rough draft is something you can actually work with, whereas a flawlessly written opening chapter that is attached to nothing is merely a polished dead end.
First-time novelists frequently make mistakes in point of view without even realizing it. Writing coach Kevin T. Johns, who published his first book after making almost all of the mistakes he now advises others to avoid, recounts how, while seated across from another writer at a coffee shop, he was calmly and directly informed that he had been jumping around in his manuscript. His answer was one of sincere perplexity. He had not been informed that he was not supposed to. He had been writing in the style of movies, switching between characters’ points of view with ease and focusing on the person who seemed most intriguing in a particular scene. That method tends to disperse rather than concentrate the reader’s emotional investment in fiction. The kind of intimacy that makes readers care about what happens next is created by staying inside one character’s head for each scene. It is diluted by jumping between heads, frequently without the writer realizing it.
Plot threads that run parallel without ever connecting are a related issue that appears a little later in a manuscript. From a structural standpoint, a character who lives in the same world as the main story but has nothing to do with its main events is merely occupying space. In an early draft of her book Privilege, Adkins describes precisely this problem: a supporting character who attends the same college where the story’s major event takes place, leading a separate life that never touched on anything truly significant. It was discovered by her literary agent. Giving the character a purpose and a part in the main conflict was a sophisticated solution. The narrative felt unified instead of crowded all of a sudden. The dots were connected.
Reading testimonies from debut novelists and writing coaches makes it difficult to ignore how frequently the same patterns recur regardless of genre or background. There are too many characters without a distinct focal point. There are too many concepts in one book that would be better divided into two or three. Long sentences, complex vocabulary, and stylistic devices that constantly draw the reader out of the narrative and back to the author are examples of writing that tries too hard to impress. Most authors want readers who don’t consider a book’s quality after finishing it. After finishing it, they reflect on the events, the characters, and the emotions that persisted. The prose that accomplishes that is often imperceptible.
The final trap, which is more subtle than the others, is writing too closely to personal experience. It makes sense to have an inclination to fictionalize actual people and events because it seems like a surefire way to find emotional truth. However, being close has its own drawbacks. Critical comments about a character cease to be craft advice and become personal when that character is essentially the writer. It turns out that distance serves more purposes than just psychological ones. It liberates one’s creativity. Johns talks about how it was relieving to write a protagonist who was completely unlike him—someone he could do anything with, reshape without attachment, and follow wherever the plot called for. As a result, the book improved. The author also became more adaptable to it.
Perhaps the reason it’s so simple to ignore is that none of this is especially mysterious. First-time writers don’t make unique mistakes due to a lack of talent or vision. They are mostly process-related mistakes, such as when to write and edit, which viewpoint to maintain, and how many threads a single story can truly contain. Those who learned these lessons early enough to make course corrections or who had an honest person sitting across from them at a coffee shop tell them what wasn’t working are typically the writers who finish their first books. While they wait for the others to catch up, the others continue to polish their first chapters.
Alyssa Bennett as editor at vclib.org, oversees editorial coverage of literary criticism, cultural analysis, political commentary. Alyssa brings rigorous research discipline, in-depth knowledge, experience, and an approachable editorial voice to subjects that most readers find thought-provoking and culturally significant. Her career spans the intersection of literary journalism, political writing, and educational publishing.