Author reflections
So You Want To Be an Author…
From practice and experimentation to multiple published novels.
Let me begin by summarising what I have published in the past couple of years. All of these works have come out since early 2020:
- 5 novels and a novella of the Druid Stones Saga
- 2 novels (the third is coming soon) of the Sparta Online series
- 2 novels and a short story in the Shadow Kingdoms series.
- A LitRPG webnovel, The Tooth and Claw Guild.
- A gamelit web-novel, Sorcerer Level 1.
- Another web-novel in progress: Demon Hunters.
Not bad going for a couple of years, I think it’s fair to say.
It took me at least ten years of getting to grips with creative writing.
But it certainly wasn’t an easy process to write my first published novel. And in fact, the hardest thing wasn’t the writing of that novel itself, but the road that led up to it. It took me at least ten years of getting to grips with creative writing.
You see, I had been writing for years before releasing the first of the Druid Stones novels. In part, I’d been busy with life, work, family… But I’d also been writing.
The problem was, I hadn’t settled on one thing, or taken a particular writing project through to completion.
I used to write on the train to work. I have multiple ideas, character sketches and drafts. I even completed NaNoWriMo around ten years ago, producing a 50,000 word draft.
But at the time, I hadn’t really settled on what I wanted to write, or fully developed my craft.
To be frank, I didn’t even really know what genre to write in!
I also spent (wasted) a lot of time going back and editing the first few chapters of earlier works, trying to combine them, or otherwise trying to make those early words count for something.
This leads to two key tips:
- Decide what you want to write. Doing so will allow you to stop messing around, and focus instead.
- Don’t re-write or edit older work. Treat it as a practice, put it aside, and start something new.
It probably feels a bit harsh to suggest that the early drafts weren’t worth completing. In fact, the reason I can write so fast now is at least partly because I developed my pace during challenges such as NaNoWriMo, and the many stories that I wrote in those years. They were valuable.
The thing is, once you get better at writing, it is more efficient to write something new using those new skills (and speed) than to try to sort out the flawed work you did before.
If you can now write well and fast — and you will be able to, after enough practice — then why spend days, weeks, months trying to get a flawed, problematic first draft into shape?
You could instead write a new, better novel from scratch without making all those rookie errors!
In fact, once you get your word count up to a few thousand per day, you could even write a sold, competent novel in a month or less (I know people who produce a complete first draft of a novel in as little as ten days).
I am not the fastest writer in the world, but I am quick enough to produce those novels that I mentioned earlier.
All in all, it really doesn’t make sense to re-work those early efforts. It certainly doesn’t for me. And if it doesn’t make sense for an experienced writer, then it doesn’t make sense for inexperienced writers either. Probably even less so.
I mean, yeah, I could knock those drafts into shape. But the key point is, it would still take me longer than producing something new — and the end result would still be worse!
Writing is like so many other skills — you get better with practice. Much better. So don’t look back. You are now a much better writer than you ever were in the past.
I hope that was useful to you. Good luck with your own writing!
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