I learned the hard way what not to do when writing a book.
Now I know why you don’t publish your first book. If you don’t know what you are doing, you create a mess for yourself.
I didn’t have a plan, I thought ‘I’m a panser, this book is going to be great. Real writers don’t need to spend months plotting out their book.’
But I was wrong, seriously wrong, and I learned from it. I understand why people spend a lot of time writing a book, editing it, perfecting it, then they don’t write another one.
It’s a lot of work if you don’t know what you’re doing, that’s the same with everything in life. If you don’t do the research and figure out the best way to do something, it soon becomes harder to fix your mistakes. And believe me, you will make a lot of mistakes if you just jump in with both feet.
You want to have a good product; you want to show the world your talent.
But I am impatient. I want to get it done and get it out there. I have absolutely no patience anymore. If it doesn’t give me satisfaction immediately, I move on. Trying to write a book the right way will definitely test your patience. It takes time, unlike writing a short article, editing it, and hitting publish, then getting feedback, comments, and likes (claps.) Now that’s instant gratification!
Maybe I'm not cut out to be a novelist, and that’s not ok with me. I want to be an author; I want that feeling of accomplishment. I want to be able to say I wrote a book. But most of all I have it in me, the need to write a book, I have lots of ideas and stories, and I feel it pulling me. I need to do it.
In actuality, I did write two books, two very short books, novelettes, I guess you would call them, with the intention to write more of the story, five more novelettes, to be exact, and create a series. But based on my grand scheme to just let the muse drive the bus, without bothering to ask them where exactly we were going, I royally screwed up the first book in the series, and now I don’t have the motivation to rewrite the whole 30,000 words.
My first book, the idea I thought would be great, my book baby, turned out to be a disaster. I ruined it by rushing, by not knowing what I was doing, by not having a plan. My second book I learned a little from the first and had more of a plan. It turned out better, but I didn’t have the passion I did with the first book, so I think it suffered.
So here my two tiny books sit on my computer waiting for me to bring them back to life with editing, a lot of editing, but I don’t have the heart.
Now, my third book, that’s going to be great, I know what not to do.
Or, I will just completely start over with my first book, not rewriting it but writing from the beginning, starting over from scratch but with a plan, a real plan, like real writers do.
I will have a book one day, but you can know that that book is going to be good, that I worked hard on it, and I felt it was some of my best writing. That’s what I want to put out into the world.
