a journey of misconceptions.
When I started writing my first book, I was so green, so blissfully naive. I thought well, let’s see: I’ll write this book during Camp NaNoWriMo, so in one month it will be done, then I’ll edit it quickly, then I’ll start querying, obviously get an agent straightaway, and then sell my book in a few months, and it will be published by next year. Great plan. For a clown.
This is how it really went:
finished NaNoWriMo (yay!) but with a ton of plotholes (boo) and also learned that 50K is just not a novel!
submitted to Pitch Wars 2020 thinking, “well, if I get a request, I can just finish everything really quickly!”
did not get chosen for Pitch Wars (shocker)
tried to fill in plot holes, got discouraged, tried again, got discouraged, repeat x 10
edited a bunch of times, sometimes forgetting what I was doing and creating new plot holes and inconsistencies
FINALLY filled my plot holes about a year or so later, continued editing
still felt nowhere near ready to query, knew I needed help
submitted to Pitch Wars 2021, got (1) request (it felt so cool!!!)
did not get in to Pitch Wars 2021
considered submitting to AMM, but the one person I was really hoping to submit to wasn’t a mentor
DMed them and asked them to mentor me anyway (hi Kalie!)
started working with my mentor, doing closer edits and real revisions
and now…I continue to do that, and hopefully I’ll be ready to query soon.
I started writing my book in July 2020, it is now March 2022, and my book is (hopefully) in its last round of edits before I start querying. Then I have to hope that it catches a few agents’ attention and I find the perfect one to sign with. Once that happens, I’ll probably need to revise again before I go on submission, and then I’ll need an editor to love my book so much that they get their imprint to buy it. And if all goes according to that plan (and it might not!) it will still be another year or two before my book is actually out in the world. So, yeah. Safe to say it is not the three month process I once anticipated.
I don’t know where exactly my misconceptions came from, other than being clueless because I was new to writing books, though not new to writing. Maybe it was the time I heard a famous author with a Netflix adaptation that I loved say that she wrote that book in six weeks, and I thought that if I couldn’t write a whole book in six weeks, I was a failure. Maybe it was an unearned confidence that I lost shortly after, delusionally thinking I could write a book and edit a book so quickly, and just as quickly get an agent to love it. Maybe I just really wanted it to be true because I had just started writing a book and it was so much fun, and I knew I wanted to do this forever, and I had just lost my job and I thought if I can sell this book, I won’t have to worry. (Spoiler alert: even if I do sell this book, I will most likely still have to worry about money.)
So, in honor of the working title of my book, which has undergone so many changes since July 2020, this is what I know:
writing books is hard (but fun!) and it takes as much time as it takes.
you will need to revise, like a lot.
there’s no such thing as a perfect first draft, so let yourself be messy and clean it up later.
my stories, to some extent, WILL write themselves because I can’t outline to save my life. sure, I can try a bunch of times, with different methods, but I’ll still end up doing whatever feels right when it comes down to it.
writing query materials is so much harder than it looks.
selling your first book is not a given. (this one hurts)
even when someone does sell a book, it takes a LONG time for it come out!
my journey is mine alone, not to be compared to anyone else’s.
Because I thought my journey would be easier and more straightforward, sometimes it’s hard to reflect on how far I’ve come. But I’ve done so much, even if it’s taken me much longer than I anticipated. And I’m really proud of my work so far. I am confident that my time will come, so I won’t try to rush it. Maybe the longer wait will make the payoff even more rewarding. I gotta give myself something, right?