A few weeks ago I wrote about how the best (and also the worse) advice you can give a new author is to just write. I’ve been thinking about that point since I wrote that post and I think I’d like to take that base idea and go off on another tangent.

What I want to talk about now is actually an accumulation of multiple concepts now that I think about it, as I recall a previous post in which I talked about writing multiple beginner novels vs writing just one.

But, enough beating around the bush, as evidenced by this post’s title, I want to take a moment to discuss why writing your first novel and getting it finished is so important.

It’s because it teaches you more than you think

You can read all of the books on writing available on the market (and trust me there are many of them), you can take classes, read blogs and scour www.reddit.com/r/writing, but nothing, I repeat nothing will teach you more about what you need to know about writing than finishing your first manuscript.

I don’t mean the technical things–like finding a strong balance between blocking and dialogue, or understanding strong story structure–I mean everything that is personal to you as a writer. I mean your style, your workflow, your voice. These are the things that writing your first novel teaches you. To my knowledge there is no way to know whether or not you’re a discovery writer or an outliner without just getting started and doing the work. I know plenty of people that are outliners on paper, but find themselves discovery writing and vice versa.

Likewise, there’s simply no way of knowing your workflow without getting that first novel done. For some of us, that’s an agonizing experience. I’ve spent five years on Penumbra (though I’ve only spent a dedicated portion of time for the past 12 months or so on it) and as I’m coming to a close on it, I’m already ramping up for other projects and I’m already seeing fast progress on them. Why? Because of what I’ve learned writing that first one. I know how I write now, I know how to plan for it and you can only learn that by doing.

There are plenty of technical things that you’ll learn as well. For example, 90,000 words sounds like a lot of words. But anybody that has sat down to tell you a story can tell you, it really isn’t. You’ll be amazed how fast those words will rack up and then you’ll look back and realize, “oh no! I’ve got so much more to say but only 20,000 words to say it in!” There’s no way of knowing the time it takes to get through each point without doing it. Trust me.

This is a post I’m going to need to come back to and revise some, I’ve got other ideas that are bouncing around in the back of my head but I’m itching to get writing on I’m going to leave this topic here for now and come back to it maybe tomorrow.

In the meantime, especially since Penumbra is getting close to being finished, I’m realizing I need to start putting some effort into getting my website spruced up. Have I said this before? I can’t remember. By the time you read this, it’ll probably way different than it is now, so it might not make sense in context. But trust me, right now it’s about as basic as it can be.