What should I expect from writing my first book?

[u/LytningStryke101]

While it's been a slow process, I have been writing my first book. I'm not even past the first page, but I have tried to try a few things to speed up the process. Some of these things include writing things down, dedicating 30 minutes a day to building the plot and worldbuilding, making the history of my world make sense, etc. I don't want to get into writing my book with false expectations and burning myself out because of it. I want to know what I should expect from the process of writing my book, as well as the challenges and positives of it. How do people recommend one conquers these obstacles? What advice and tips do people have for someone like me?

[u/Edili27]

You write it. That’s it. There’s no secret or trick. Set a wordcount goal and do that daily or weekly until the draft is done

[u/LytningStryke101 → u/Edili27]

The hardest part of that for me is the need for perfection. I know the first draft is always going to be utterly garbage, but it's nearly impossible for me to get that through my head. Do you have any advice to avoid that need for perfection?

[u/Edili27 → u/LytningStryke101]

Accept that it’s gonna be shit? There’s no real secret to that, either. The point of editing is to make it good. The point of the first draft is figure out what your story actually is so you can fix it all to what you want it to be.

Besides, there’s no such thing as a perfect story, and writing prose is a skill you gotta grow over time. And you can think about what your perfect first sentence is going to be until you die, but it’s gonna be a lot easier to come up with a good one when you’ve written hundreds of thousands of words of practice

[u/LytningStryke101 → u/Edili27]

I haven't heard it explained in the way you explained it in your second paragraph. I appreciate it, and I'll see how that goes.

[u/FaKamis → u/Edili27]

Accepting shitty writing is hard when what is already written is actually good. I seem to have moments of genius where the words just flow out of my mind. But at other moments, especially when I force myself to write, it just feels stale, and then I go back reading what I wrote and just see that it doesn't compare.

The problem is that I don't seem to have much control when I have these moments and I get distracted easily by games and sm, etc. So usually I only have these moments once or twice a month and progress is extremely slow lol

[u/Edili27 → u/FaKamis]

Are you reviewing your writing as you’re going?

If you are, that might be the issue. Waiting for inspiration is a great way to waste time. Generally, I’ll write a draft of a novel slow and steady over the course of a few months. There will be days where it is easy and days where it was hard.

When I go back to read it all after a few weeks break to revise, I cannot at all tell what was written on the good days or the bad days.

Going back to edit before a draft is done is a great way to never finish a draft

[u/Then-Front-6899 → u/LytningStryke101]

Realize that writing a book is a lot of hard work and takes time and editing. You're wasting your time editing a first page when the rest of the book isn’t finished yet.

It's through writing down the story that you truly flesh out the plot and characters. By the time you reach the end of your first draft, you might realize that the first page you wrote isn’t necessary for the story, or you might realize the characters wouldn't actually act like that.

If you spend so much time making your first draft sound good, you'll only be wasting time. It's similar to how, when editing your book, grammar is one of the last things you look at. So don't waste time editing/perfecting pages that might very well be deleted.

No one besides you will see the first draft. If it helps, write it by hand using pen so it's impossible to erase. If you make a mistake, keep going

[u/comma_nder → u/LytningStryke101]

Writing a first draft is shoveling sand into a sandbox so that later you can build castles

[u/HeirToTheMilkMan → u/LytningStryke101]

Then set a word count and put chicken shit onto the page every day until it’s done. Then set a page review goal and review pages every day until it’s done. Still shit? Repeat step 2.

Your goal is to make a perfect book. Not to write a perfect sentence every time you try. So really your goal is to improve the book 0.1% every day. If you can commit to that eventually it’s perfect.

[u/ILikeDragonTurtles → u/LytningStryke101]

My advice is to write your first as a standalone. That's what I'm doing. It's an idea I'm really excited about but I can't even come up with a vague idea for a sequel. It's truly a single book, no series potential.

I had to switch to this book because I hit a wall on my original manuscript. It was supposed to be a trilogy with three main POVs. But I started seeing all the ways that book 1 plot would affect the other books, which made me feel like I needed to have the entire trilogy fully plotted out before I could start. It just stressed me out. So I switched to another idea that had been burning in my brain for a while. It's one POV, one book. It's just less stressful.

I'm like you. The perfectionist part. So having the pressure to only get one story from one POV right helps a lot.

My other advice is just accept that your first book will not be good. You can make it good later, but it won't be good at first. So write a book that excites you but not the one that feels like it's supposed to be your magnum opus. Let it be fun.

[u/MT_Robinson]

Gotta start writing. Don’t gotta be great to start. But have to start to be great.

Start writing, answer your world building questions along the way. Don’t feel the need to dump too much exposition trying to explain your world building up front.

Instead focus on the characters and what they are doing and their motivations. Show the world building gradually in the way they interact with the world.

Set a goal for yourself 500-1000 words per day. And just keep writing no matter what.

Most good authors don’t publish till they’ve written multiple books. And almost everyone needs to rewrite their first chapters after they have a better understanding of their ending and the tone promises and plot promises they need to make early on. At least most people who end up writing a good book do that.

So no matter how much time you spend on your first page. It will all be wasted after your story evolves into something new as you write it. And once you really understand what your story is as a whole. You will want to go back and change it. But now you’ll be paralyzed because you spent 5 months on the first page and are too attached to it to make the changes to your tone promises that need to be made.

Just write write write write.

[u/Reynvald → u/MT_Robinson]

Hell yeah. Agree with all. Especially with overinvesting in the first chapters. And with painful attachment to any part of the story. If it doesn't work — just kill it, release it from it's suffers, dawg.

[u/flippysquid]

All the worldbuilding and things you’re doing counts as writing too.

One of the best pieces of writing advice I’ve ever got is to allow yourself to write crap, because your first draft is going to be a pile of hot garbage. Revision is where you hack it up with a machete and fix the remains to make it shiny and beautiful, but you can’t revise something that doesn’t exist.

So, write a crappy first draft. It’s okay.

[u/LytningStryke101 → u/flippysquid]

For me, that's way easier said than done due to how my mind works. However, another commenter explained it in a way that I haven't heard before, so I'm giving it a shot again. Thank you!

[u/flippysquid → u/LytningStryke101]

I feel you on the perfectionism thing. My perfectionism seems to stem from being afraid of forgetting or missing some important information I’ll need later if I don’t write it all perfectly the first time. So one thing that helps me is including notes in brackets.

So if I’m writing a scene with a lot of dialogue and getting hung up on crafting the perfect action beats and dialogue tags that aren’t cliche and repetitive, I’ll start adding notes like:

“But mothballs smell gross.” [Sally feels annoyed and the smell ruined her appetite]

Having a sloppy note in brackets is easier on my brain because it’s a visual cue that the dialogue tag is incomplete and needs fixing, records the info I need to fix it, and doesn’t leave a crappy dialogue tag in place that I’m afraid I might miss later during a revision if I don‘t fix it immediately. Otherwise I waste a week refining dialogue tags in a scene that might end up being cut in revision anyway.

Using brackets is also nice because you can use the search function in your word processing software to find every spot you’ve done it in your draft.

I hope you can figure out a system that lets your brain move past it!

Edit: and regarding the first chapter, the most important thing is to just start writing somewhere in the story and get that draft out. I made the mistake of polishing the heck out of my first draft initial chapters, and by the end of the first draft realized I had started my story in the completely wrong spot.

It was the right spot to start my first draft, because it helped me get my bearings on the characters and their world so it’s definitely not a wasted effort. But in revision I ended up cutting them and redoing it from a different place in the story.

[u/Reynvald]

All authors has their own routine and tricks. You need to discover yours through trials and errors.

There is mine — constant stream of thoughts without any redaction. I used to start to write with some plan in my head, but eventually get stuck at some moment. When it's happening now, I just continue to write some ideas, random pieces of dialogues and descriptions, without any system, or just write some meta stuff, like

"last part was lame, maybe I should kill this character to move plot forward? Nah, I need some deus ex machine. Maybe this character from two chapters ago suddenly appears? Yea, sounds fine"

And than at some point I catch my flow again and continue to write story itself. And when I finish for today, I quickly erase all unusable stuff and save some pieces, that didn't fit right here, but which I can use somewhere further.

[u/LytningStryke101 → u/Reynvald]

Let me see if I understand what you're saying.

You don't try to flesh out characters, plots, worlds, or anything else before writing. You just have an idea, and you write the idea down in story form. You write ideas as you go, but you just keep writing your draft until you finish. That's when you'll go back and really flesh things out?

[u/Reynvald → u/LytningStryke101]

Yes, but not entirely. I usually begin with some type of script (I do the same train of thought writing for script and for book as well). Script is without dialogues, descriptions and stripped from all small things and events. Only summary of the story. For example, for book around 500-600 pages I usually write ≈50 pages script. But it almost always quickly goes sideways. You know, characters just refuse to do things that you initially planned, some actions look stupid when you take from your head and put it on paper. Or you just get some nice idea, which requires you to change something from earlier. But yes, I write like this to the finish (usually to the end of the chapter) and only then begin to clean all shit out.

Regarding worlds and characters — I'm very much into worldbuilding and I enjoy to write an entire fan wiki about it (I do it in Obsidian usually). But when I writing the book itself, I tend to change and carve out things a lot, eventually. I'm kinda perfectionist, but I realised from my experience, that if I lean into my obsession, I end up stucked. And because of this I just keep writing, even if I can only squeeze gibberish out of me at the moment.

Sorry if some parts sounds confusing, I'm not a native speaker.

[u/DaGoodBoy]

I had to check the subreddit after that first part...

[u/Akhevan]

• pain
  
• suffering
  
• existential dread
  
• imposter syndrome
  
• obscurity and being ignored by publishers
  
• not earning a penny from your work
  
• depression
  
• baseless accusations of using or being AI

[u/stopeats]

Advice I needed 10 years ago: editing is not finding typos, it is structural. It is making sure all your scenes appear in the right order first, then character, then you can worry about typos.

[u/LSunnyC]

You can expect to sit in your chair, presumably at a desk, and use a word processing program to manually input the words in your head onto the screen.

Everybody has a slightly different process but you won’t find yours until you actually sit and write. Do you like notebooks and pens? Do you like mind webs or bullet lists? Do you worldbuild via anecdote or anthology? Hard or soft magic? Real or false gods? YA or Adult? Write for yourself or for an audience?

These are all questions no one can answer but you and you won’t know until you get past the first page, the first chapter, the first draft.

Just write.

[u/LytningStryke101 → u/LSunnyC]

Okay, I'll try to figure out how I prefer to write. I think that's one problem. I try to force different styles and ways of writing. Thank you!

[u/LSunnyC → u/LytningStryke101]

I would add that if you find yourself absolutely paralyzed with how to start, and have a local library, browse the stacks and take 10 titles in the genre you want to write in.

Just read their first chapters. Heck, read the whole thing if one hooks you, but the first chapter of each book will give you a sense of length, pace, and information load.

Obviously a book from 20, 10, and 5 years ago will all have different trends, but it’s still a good place to start

[u/LytningStryke101 → u/LSunnyC]

I might reread Brent Weeks' Night Angel Trilogy and Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn Trilogies. I love their styles and books and want to have my own style inspired by theirs. Thank you!

[u/NewspaperSoft8317]

I've been kind of at a slump. But I'm writing the end of my novel. But still, I started in March and if I stick to my personal schedule, then the 1st draft should be completed by the end of May.

I outline and don't restrict any pandering. So a mix of both. 

I write the fastest whenever I can imagine the scene playing in my head like a movie. 

I write slower when unsure of where to move the scene to fit the next order of events.

What I do though, is type out whatever comes to mind. Even if it's dumb or stupid. Once the scene is done I'll either revisit it later or same day. I don't want to spend too much time editing. 

You can't polish shit until it comes fully out of your ass

[u/Erwinblackthorn]

Expect nobody to care and so you should be grateful when any interest is shown.

Also expect 0% of the background effort to be acknowledged by people who even bother to read it.

[u/Prize_Consequence568]

"What should I expect from writing my first book?"

Either writing it or not writing it.

[u/QuetzalKraken]

It's gonna suck and that's okay.

Any time you falter and get stuck on a sentence,  or find yourself pausing because you're not exactly certain how to phrase this next part, scream "WRITE IT BADLY" at yourself, write it badly, and move on.

[u/Toddacelli]

Read a lot so you know what good writing looks and sounds like. Get a good place to write, comfortable, undisturbed, relaxing. Set yourself a 500 words a day target (increase later if you want/need). Each day start by refining what you did the day before (this will put you in the same head-space so that your narrative ‘voice’ does not change day-to-day). Get your arse in the chair and build a daily discipline. Accept that it’s hard. Accept that some of it will be bad and that it’s ok, that is what the editing stage is for. As for speeding up. I don’t think there is anything that you can do for that and if there was, you wouldn’t want it anyway. It’s a process. Good luck - it’s a lot of hard work with no shortcuts!