My youngest sister and her kids came to visit today and S. asked me about my writing - as she is wont to do. I told her about my list of short stories and my rejections, but she was more interested in any more books I'd written.
It's nice to get support from family, but she's only read one. One she thought was great and had been written, oh, some ... years ago.
She wanted to buy it, but I had to refuse, because of copyright issues.
Why did S. want to buy it? So she could put more (actually, some) sex into it.
I also refused for another reason. It was my first - sigh. Yep. The very first book I finished writing from beginning to end.
I can remember being so damned chuffed. I had tried for years to write a book and mostly managed only halfway before I chucked it in.
A year overseas taught me many things, but I came back, sat down with a glass of chateau del cardboard and wrote; for three weeks of ten hour days and bashed at the keyboard to create a story of love, adventure, danger and romance.
And it sucked. Majorly. In a huge way. Gobsmackingly sucked like a vacuum cleaner.
Aww... It did, really. I sent it to my romance writing teacher, all filled with smug and achievement and she sent it back with... disappointment. Oh, she was polite, but she sent her reply via an audio tape and I could hear it in her voice. I still have that tape, but I've never heard it all the way through; I've never re-read the book, nor have I re-written any part.
First books are, by their very nature, awful; and anyone who says not is a liar. I'm not talking about first books published: Maggie Shayne wrote eight before publishing, S.L. Viehl wrote some thirty, even Nora Roberts is embarrassed about her first book.
But first books have something about them that can never be re-visited: they are, for the above writers, First Class Disasters.
What does that mean? That those authors never gave up, that they saw, within the cliches, the stilted dialogue, the exaggerated heroes and heroines, the kernals of talent on which to build. They understood that writing is an ongoing learning process, that to succeed you must learn to fail. And know that it's okay to do so.
My first book taught me these things. It taught me an even more valuable lesson: that I can write a book of two hundred pages. Since then, I've written nine more, including a trilogy done in six weeks and together makes up nigh on a thousand pages.
With each book I learned to craft the story, the characters, the dialogue, the world building better, more creatively.
What do you now think of your First Class Disaster?
2 comments:
I'm actually rewriting my first disaster. There's enough good in it to make it worth the effort, though of course, it sucks a vacuum dry.
Maybe the reason there are salvageable elements lies in the fact that I was 40 when I wrote it, an avid reader since I was 5, and having a nice amount of non fiction writing under my belt. Plus an epic War and Peace fanfiction I wrote in high school. Now, that one is beyond redemption. :)
Nothing is ever wasted, is it, be it plot, a character or something as simple as a really good line.
That's one of the reasons I kept the first disaster - it'll be good to mine scenes, or dialogue or something; otherwise, it will be thrown into the abyss.
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