Will Your First Book Always Be Bad? | Dear Writer #7
101 Writer Questions Answered
This question been hanging around my head for a while now. We always hear that our first book gonna suck and I wanted to ask : Is this certain? Can’t you rewrite a book enough times that it becomes a good book? And can’t you rewrite your idea so it becomes a better book?
Dear Writer,
It's a great question because it orbits the subjectivity/objectivity discussion of what we do. I assume you mean the first book someone "writes," not just the first book that is published. So:
Can you rewrite a book so that it's better on the other side of the rewriting process? Of course; that’s editing!
Can you take the same premise, characters, and story beats from a "complete" novel and essentially rewrite it from the ground up and have it be a better book thereafter? Yes.
Provided your goal is to improve at making omelettes, can you make an omelette better the 500th time than the first? More likely than not. You understand eggs, butter, pans, and heat better with more experience than with less. You can look at the egg and understand intuitively that it's ready to be flipped. This intuition is only built through time and discipline.
Same goes for storytelling.
I think what we can say with certainty that, given the assumption one continually writes to improve, the book they write five years later will be better than the book they wrote five years ago because the writer is more experienced.
The self-aware writer knows the ways in which the book written with less experience isn’t as good as the one written with more experience. This hasn’t stopped so-so first books from being liked by readers and published by big houses. You can look at an older work, know you'd do it better if you started today, and still have a work that’s worthy to be read.
You'll know the ways in which the newer work is superior. I don't now, nor did I at the time, think my first book stunk. It was always good given the level of maturity I'd reached.
But editing and revising my first book to align my former level of experience with my current is one of the most difficult tasks I’ve yet undertaken as an author.
Hope you find something helpful here. Keep working!
DRM
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DANIEL RODRIGUES-MARTIN is the author of books, articles, essays, poems, reviews, and countless rants since 2004. His debut novel, GODDESS FROM THE MACHINE, is available from most major carriers.