The things that I did wrong in my first novel

and hope to avoid in my second

My first novel was an abject failure. I spent over ten years researching and writing it and thousands of dollars on editors who seemed more eager to be paid than to edit my book as they had promised. I did many conceptual rewrites and constant line-by-line editing. I even was my own copyeditor. The result was a self-published novel that didn’t work for readers or me. I put it out there on the web as much to get it off my desk as from a vain hope my doubts were misplaced. They weren’t. Or was all the time and money wasted?  I found at least one good friend and editor, and I apparently learned something about writing on the way: early readers and editors are responding to my second with comments that show they understand what I am trying to accomplish in the second novel and specific advice on how to improve it. That’s a low bar but an important one. Many editors could make neither hide nor hair of my first novel. Most importantly, I enjoyed writing it more than the first.

Why?

I begin to answer this question by considering a standard admonition to beginning writers: Write what they know about. I heard and read it everywhere before I typed the first word of my first novel, and it is unobjectionable, even correct, as far as it goes. Many people have relied on it, and I followed the advice the best I could. I reproduced the courtroom experience as accurately as possible: the paper shuffling, the intense but limited focus, the stories that relied on stereotypes and a few well-known story arcs, and the omnipresent boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

As I was writing in a postmodern time, I chose to follow the style of those who began it: modernist writers willing to experiment with the modern novel brought to its height in the early years of the twentieth century. I would read James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Elliot, and every other modernist author I could find. I began with Ulysses. As I hadn’t opened it since college, I bought the most respected edition I could find. It was enjoyable but confusing. Accordingly, I researched his likely source material and poured over guides to the novel, both large and small. I tracked down scholarly articles and famous critics. I read his contemporaries in fiction, theatre, and poetry. I even attempted Finnegans Wake but only succeeded in reading a hundred selected pages or so before giving up.

I didn’t stop with the modernist novelists; I also read Franz Kafka, Randall Keenan, Alice Walker, and everybody else who seemed relevant or simply interesting. Nor did I stop with novels. I simultaneously read about the city of Detroit, where I would set the book, and the city's and nation's history. I read novels and proclamations of Black rebellion, historical and scholarly works about the race riots in the city, and the architecture of Detroit. I read Phyllis Wheatley, and Thomas Jefferson critiquing her poetry. I set no boundaries, and this proved a major distraction.

Having done so for several years, I decided I was ready to write my novel’s first page. The book would combine everything I had read but follow Joyce the most. It would be both a satire and an homage to him, and it would blow the lid off the caldron of confusion, boredom, and moments of sheer terror that was a real-life trial. Nothing could be taken at face value; the novel’s structure underlay, enhanced, and queered everything at once. It would be confusing on the first read, maybe even the second, but coruscating on the third. In short, it was a deliberate mess.

My friend tried to tell me so, but I listened only to a limited extent. I was arrogant. Like Joyce, I wanted critics to study my novel for a thousand years. I tried to reproduce reality more accurately while sending up the idea of a coherent story and narrator at the same time. A trial was a confusing and imperfect mess. Life was even more so, and each person had to create their own story from it. I’d studied Joyce and the other early modernists to learn how to write a novel and didn’t know any other way to write a story. Indeed, I couldn’t. I lacked the skills or knowledge to do so.

One small press responded with interest. Perhaps only a little interest, but not another form rejection. They gave a few comments and asked to see any revisions along those lines. My editor friend was as shocked as I was, but she assured me that the interest was genuine and the press reputable. Accordingly, I set about making the suggestions and sent them another copy.

This process went on several times before the latest draft came back with a request for me to make the courtroom scene more exciting. This request left me flabbergasted. What were they thinking? Hadn’t they read the book? I’d made the novel boring on the surface but tried to keep my reader’s interest through the interplay of language, form, and plot. There was no climax and no justice in the trial of an African American. This was reality, or at least, how I perceived it.

I would also have to drop the entire last section of the book, which was the trial transcript, and replace it with another author’s work. Who would this be? Would it be a traditional narrative or a stream of consciousness like the other narrator’s? It was also a lot of work, especially when I didn’t know what they wanted and doubted I could do it as a matter of technique. I had studied Joyce, not John Grisham, although I have always enjoyed his novels.

Ultimately, I married the traditional and stream-of-consciousness approaches with disastrous results. The novel was even more incoherent on the surface than before, and I didn’t like it. Neither did the publisher, and that draft ended the process.

I was back on square one and decided to write a traditional legal thriller as I’d once intended to do. I knew it intimately from watching Agatha Christie’s play Witness for the Prosecution and Robert Traver’s Anatomy of a Murder many times. I’d read the book for the latter movie many times as I had read Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent and innumerable other legal thrillers.

Or I thought I did. It didn’t take long for me to discover I knew them as a reader, not a writer. I would have to learn the difference. Moreover, I continued to struggle (still do!) with the difference between the reality in my head and the reality portrayed by writers of any type of novel. Five, six, seven years went by before any publisher showed an interest in my rewrites, but one did after I submitted it to a contest. However, I wasn’t sure. The email expressing interest seemed to be a form. After consulting with my editor friend, I decided to respond—and flubbed it badly by asking a few pointed questions rather than unmitigated eagerness and excitement. That was the end of that.

Two more years of revising and editing brought me to the banks of the Rubicon. I finally understood that writing my novel how it should be done would require spending several more years of paring and adding—especially the latter. I had too much plot and not enough detail or character development. Things happened abruptly, without the necessary preparation. The final draft should be at least five hundred, if not more, pages long. For a first novel, that is a very long book. Publishers would likely shy away from it.

More importantly, I didn’t want to rewrite the novel as it should be. It had exhausted me, and a long novel wasn’t what I set out to write ten years earlier. Yet, I needed to get it off my desk to clear my mind. I would deal with the same themes in my next novel, but this one had to go.

I could chuck it entirely, but I decided to self-publish it as an e-book. Rather than send it through another round of costly editing that would, at best, tell me what I already knew, I revised it myself using a grammar checker I had bought instead. I reordered the novel, cutting out entire chapters and bringing others to the forefront. I emphasized simplicity and clarity over every other value. It took three dedicated months of editing, but I was ready to publish it. I expected little acclaim and got less, but that was okay. I would do better next time.

As I wrote above, it appears I may have done so. That doesn’t mean any traditional published will issue it. It doesn’t mean I will self-publish it, although it might. The only result might be these blog posts designed to help other writers enjoy their own writing and, I sincerely hope, get published by describing what I have learned from writing my first two novels. Two weeks from now, I will write about what I thought people meant when they said every book has to find its audience and how that has changed, but I invite readers to share their stories about writing their first novel.