Escaping the 12-years novel

Time is your enemy, but not in the way you think

People - and by this I mean established writers - will tell you about the Great Divide separating those who want to write a novel, and those who have.

This is a real, almost tangible thing. And a good starting point.

I made several attempts at finishing a novel. I was a victim of the young writer’s myth, which made my urge to succeed particularly severe. We’ll talk about it some other day. Bottom line: every failed attempt, every dead-branch story, every unfocussed new beginning weighed me down with the after taste of failure (of course, back then I didn’t know that failure is good, actually).

Eventually the right idea hit my brain. Of course, it was the muse. I remember this because I had just finished watching Star Wars ep. 8 (meh) at the theatre. It was December 2017¹.

I grit my teeth, worked consistently 1 hour each evening after my day job, and in around 14 months, I had completed the first draft. My far-future, Nihei inspired scifi was done, start to finish.

A scene from Nihei’s BLAME!, which greatly influenced me.

Except that it was trash.

Thrown into the revising pit

Of course back in January 2019 I didn’t know my book was trash. Yet. I was understandably in love with it, since it had a very long pregnancy lasting more than a year. And finally I had a novel ready, start to finish.

It wasn’t a costless endeavor. It was a beast 140.000 long, full of spit, sweat and blood (all mine). But most of all, it was full of man hours. I was aware the first draft had issues, sure; the only rational thing was to polish it. After all, I couldn’t start writing another 1-year long novel from scratch when I could just fix this one, right?

I started a second draft.

Then a third.

Then a fourth.

Each one was more tired than the last, as I was still working in my evenings and during a rough patch of my life. In the meantime, I started looking around in the publishing business. Trying to find a home for my brainchild.

Fast forward to November 2021. The current draft is labelled “six”. A low-to-average count, maybe, when Sanderson said that some of his earlier books he went through 12² and currently lists 5 as the standard³.

I had already invested 4 years into the project. I was working on other projects on the side (I remember starting with short stories around 2020, maybe). But Tolkien took 12 years to finish LOTR, and 5 more to publish⁴.

Everything was fine?

Meet the sunk cost fallacy

the phenomenon whereby a person is reluctant to abandon a strategy or course of action because they have invested heavily in it, even when it is clear that abandonment would be more beneficial.

Let’s start with the obvious.

Most people are not Tolkien. And I do not mean to belittle or stifle one’s aspirations, I mean it literally. Most people, are not, Tolkien⁵.

If your working process requires, in order to succeed, one tenth of your life (optimistically) of writing time, your process is bad.

Let’s take half that time. Six years writing and drafting before sending your novel out. If you don’t have cash to burn on a professional editor, as is often the case, you’re looking at six years in the dark. Add more or less six months, to wait for agents or a publishing company to pick up your book.

Sure, you can call in beta readers way before that. Perhaps even your own writing group. But that’s not exactly the same thing. As time dilates, you become more and more attached to the novel just because you’ve invested in it.

My Sci-Fi was stillborn. I loved it dearly, but I had to realize that. It might come back one day, but I am no longer entertaining the idea of working on a seventh draft. No seventh draft is possible because the issue is in the very bones of the novel. It has all the naivety and the hopefulness of a first book.

I am still glad I wrote it. I will carry it with me, and it will live on in a form or another. But I didn’t need to stifle my own growth on its shiny metal altar. I should have recognized the sunk cost and let it sink.

Eventually I swam towards the light.

Good time, bad time

Time is part of the process. My first novel took 14 months.

Now I have written:

• A collection of short stories in the span of two years (maybe a total of 4 months effective writing time, plus translation to publish it both in English and Italian)

• A fantasy novel around 70k which first draft took around 4 months

• A weird-horror story around 70k written in less than 2 months

A lot was done through Nanowrimo⁶ , which is a great tool to learn a habit and force oneself to go fast. My point here is that now I have the pulse of how much time I can spend.

If a 4-months draft sinks, if I don’t want to revision it, if I don’t want to fight for it, I can let it rest. Especially since I know that I can have a new manuscript up and running in 2 to 3 months, if the Muse agrees.

This has been a learning process.

Bottomline:

The time you spend while learning by doing is good time. You cannot always be efficient and you cannot be perfect. It’s ok.

Conversely, the time you spend chasing dragons and postponing with the very uncomfortable truth that you might have to start over is time you are stealing from your own learning.

A guideline for your work

What can you learn from this, if you a new, or somewhat new, writer?

1. Keep a clock on your projects. Your first work is allowed to reach the 2-years mark in the making, but if that happens, start planning contingencies.

   1. They can look like a side project, short stories, another novel, an outline… anything.

2. Each new phase informs you on the mistakes of the past. Revising once teaches you on the mistakes of you first draft. Revising twice reveals you were sleeping during revision 1. Calling an editor will reveal more. Marketing is shit. Querying, a whole other beast.

   1. Getting stuck in loops will bring you nowhere. You should have a set time for each phase, after which, the project gets in the drawer.

3. For the love of all you hold dear, don’t endlessly rewrite your old work. You cannot be objective about it. Your newly improved writing skills cannot shine if all you are forced to do is trying to be faithful to who you wear X years ago.

And to think that this was supposed to be a short post…

Was this useful? Maybe you’d consider clicking on one of those two buttons?

1. I’m doing a lot of archaeologic research in my pc to dig up the dates for this article. Hope you’ll appreciate.

2. I don’t remember the source for this. It was either one episode of the earlier seasons of Writing Excuses, or an excerpt from his creative writing classes available on Youtube.

3. https://faq.brandonsanderson.com/knowledge-base/what-is-your-process-for-drafting-a-book/

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien

5. Tolkien himself would feel and act differently if he were to be reborn today.

6. https://nanowrimo.org