The first book a writer completes is unlikely going to be their best book.
Our first novels are young. They can be naïve. Sure, some first novels are masterworks, but that’s not the case for most of us.
Our first novels are our fledgling emergences into the title of novelist. As we go on to write more novels, our craft will improve, we’ll learn more both as writers and general humans, and all of that learning will go into our words to make (we hope) every novel we write better, wiser than the last.
For most of us, our first novels are our practice fields.
And they are also the most important books we’ll ever write, no matter how many bigger and better things we create in the future.
Writing your first novel brings with it not only the completed work, but it’s a moment where our mindset shifts.
Once you write that first novel, even if you never publish it, you’re no longer the aspiring writer who wants to write a novel, you’re the writer who can write a novel, you’re the writer who has written a novel.
And there’s nothing else in the world, no writing course, no certificate or degree, nothing else that can confer that graduation moment on you.
Once you write that first novel, you have proven to yourself (and to whomever else you feel you need to prove it to) that you can write something more than an opening scene, that you can muddle your way through the murky middle. You’ve proven that you can bring sixty thousand (ish) words together to form a complex and multilayered thought. You’ve proven you can tell a real story. When we’re brain deep in that first draft of that first book, these feats can seem impossible.
When we’re writing that first novel draft, we need to have faith that we are capable of getting the work done.
There’s no amount of positive affirmation and self-belief that can shift our mindsets into having faith we can do a thing and to truly knowing without question that we can do a thing.
Achievement unlocked. Novelist level complete.
You don’t need to learn absolutely everything about novel writing to write a novel, especially your first novel. But if you’d like an easily digestible guide to getting your ideas and words wrangled into a finished novel when you’ve not made it to that level before, you might be interested in my book, How To Write Your First Novel.
