Please enjoy the catharsis of reading about a cheerful new writer who thought internet strangers would love her 280,000-word epic fantasy novel. If there’s advice in here, you’re welcome to it.
So, writing my first book went like this:
I finished a draft.
It was simple fantasy fare: A young guy gets magic powers he never asked for and saves the day. In 30 days of NaNoWriMo, I churned out 100k words and later added 20k in edits. I was a new writer without expectations, riding a wave of freedom and joy.
The concept had lived in my head for six years. I’d made an outline, settled my world-building and explored my characters, and the book came out exactly how I envisioned it. My writing voice was rusty, mostly unused since my teenage fanfiction years, but I was happy. I shared my finished work with some people close to me who said, “Cool! This seems like a book!”
I went off the rails with world-building.
Enter the next year, when my slumbering imagination went into overdrive. My NaNo book snowballed into four additional drafts, each version shored up with more words, more characters, and more world-building.
Imagine my process as a car. Imagine my technical writing degree putting gas in the tank, while my hungry, curious ADHD brain shoved into the driver’s seat, strong-armed me for control of the wheel, and ran us all off-road.
Oh boy, we were going world-building! My research stacked up into folders of 100-page reference documents, where I hoarded my world’s divergent human biology and evolution, maps of tectonic plates and hand-crafted Köppen climate classifications.
I built a solar system. My characters suddenly had electrical powers and ultraviolet vision and family trees of descendants. I had space travel! I had time travel! I had misconceptions about the electromagnetic spectrum, and a Worldbuilding Stack Exchange account to ask savvier people to sort them out!
And at last, I had a new book. The “final” version clocked in at 280,000 words, had 100,000 words of the sequel in progress, and featured at least eight POVs. Nice. People were going to love it. It was so interesting.
Excited, I gathered up an armful of chapters and went online, ready to share with the world. I was confident that I was steps away from traditional publishing and that everyone was going to appreciate this book as much as me.
I faced reality.
It was great! Everyone loved it.
No, I’m kidding. I mowed through beta readers. No one could get past chapter one. My characters forged through a fog of dense writing, syntax issues, info-dumping and tensionless scenes. I edited for months, trying to improve from critique while unsure how to handle the other kind of feedback from internet strangers– useful gems like “dude this is awful” and “you don’t understand fiction.”
And by god, I had to know what I was doing “wrong.” My binary system of thinking (probably back-seat driving, hogging the map) demanded action. I wanted some author-ly authority to swoop down and tell me how to fix my book the one, true, “right” way.
Hold on. Wait a second. Let me get this out of my pocket—Aha. Here’s some advice:
If you’re a new writer, the grind is a necessary part of the process. If it’s hard and you’re struggling and you aren’t getting a lot of positive feedback, it’s okay. You’re not doing anything “wrong.” You’re learning. Keep going.
So, back to the story.
Demoralized when my ‘archangel of fiction’ didn’t show up to bless me with better craft, I trudged through different writing communities. While there, I entered into a cursed bartering system where I exchanged the same advice that was handed to me from someone else, and I still didn’t understand any of it. After editing my chapters for the nth time, I’d hunt for critique partners to swap with, which always ended in a “yeah, no thanks.”
After months of work, I thought I’d finally ironed out my problems. But when I posted a chapter online again, I cycled through the same old story. My writing was distant, my characters inaccessible. I was stuck.
I gave up (for a bit)
So I took a break. My break was a whole summer month. Instead of writing or even thinking about writing, I played a super depressing Russian horror-adventure video game, and it was great. Refreshed after an existential crisis that wasn’t about my book, I was back and eager to improve.
I studied books
I made a folder on my computer called “A Fresh Start.” The book I wrote over the next few months was exactly that: a brand new document where I got rid of all the old scenes and sentences and rewrote it from the ground up, this time mimicking the narrative style, characters and pacing in published novels. I swapped the plate tectonic research for craft books and notes on four-act structure. I started to dissect every book that I read for what happens, when it happens, and how it’s conveyed.
That same year, my characters suddenly had distinct and interesting voices. My syntax improved to the point where readers commented “clear and easy to read” or “nice style.” (WHAT?) A beta reader finished it, and for the first time all year, I was able to have discussions about character arcs and narrative issues in my plot instead of just hacking through the syntax jungle.
I found people
Hot off that success, I tried for Pitch Wars. My big takeaway was the introductions to other like-minded writers. For me, communicating in online spaces is stressful. I always feel at risk of being misunderstood, and there’s no opportunity for me to soothe my hypervigilance by reading facial expressions.
But this group? Great! They were so great! I joined Discords and swapped chapters with other Pitch Wars hopefuls and writers who were supportive in ways I hadn’t encountered elsewhere.
Floating on all the excitement, I decided to go all out and I queried a handful of agents. Somehow, the book—that book, the one that was once incomprehensible word lettuce—got a full manuscript request. While it was rejected, I was grateful for the confidence boost and excited to move on to the next thing.
I learned lessons
I still love my Frankenstein’s monster, the novel that went from 120k to 280k and back again. I won’t moralize the final product as “bad” or “good” because ultimately, that hot mess taught me everything.
Like many of us have experienced, my first novel pushed me to improve my craft. It forced me to confront criticism, and learn how to filter feedback and take what I trust. It showed me that world-building is addictive (and oh, do I ever love learning and using what I learn to make stuff up), but I need to strengthen a book’s heart with compelling characters, and emotions and stuff.
(The book I queried that got me an agent features I protagonist that I wrote straight from the heart. The whole world in the book formed around the idea of him, and I think he’s neat.)
I made it gay
And very important to my own journey, as my drafts evolved, they got dark and they got funny and they got queer. I held myself back from showing my own identity in my first drafts, thinking that queer characters and narratives informed by my experiences wouldn’t have a place on the shelf.
Reading lots of books published in the last decade helped me realize I was wrong. Queer SFF exists, and I’m grateful to count myself among the genre’s readers and writers.
