What happened to everyone's first book?

[AnyaKimlin]

My first novel has one POV (it is first person), my second has two (third-limited)and my third has three or four (third-omniscient) lol TBH I find writing in a very limited POV the easiest. I have a tendency to have too much plot and too many characters so filtering it through one POV helps reduce confusion and allows me to have a bigger story and world.

Writing an omniscient with six characters has been my biggest challenge. I find it really hard to keep it from becoming messy.

 

[Gabe.]

My first novel is still in progress. It's slow going and often I find myself drawn back to smashing out silly short stories, or randomly getting down some lines of a scene that has nothing to do with the project I'm working on. Luckily, I'm not writing in order to be published, but rather as a training excersise to practice my writing skill. It means that I have a lot more freedom to experiment, over-write and things like that. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe it isn't...who knows?

 

[Dante DiBenedetto]

My first novel has one POV (it is first person), my second has two (third-limited)and my third has three or four (third-omniscient) lol TBH I find writing in a very limited POV the easiest. I have a tendency to have too much plot and too many characters so filtering it through one POV helps reduce confusion and allows me to have a bigger story and world.

Writing an omniscient with six characters has been my biggest challenge. I find it really hard to keep it from becoming messy.

I don't know what it is, but I hate writing first person for novels. Granted, I'll use the occasional italicized soliloquy, but I like having access to the whole scene quite a bit more with the 'zooms' that 3-O allows.

After getting about 50 pages in to this mss, I was tempted to start adding in POVs because my pacing was dropping. I almost want to, solely off the merit that I think the book has a decent prospect as a series, and the idea of having to do another few more books from just one POV is quite frankly terrifying xD I think the solution will simply have to be a thorough outlining, something I'm usually opposed to.

 

[MemoryTale]

My first "book" was basically fanfiction written in a notebook, written at the age of thirteen. I'm not sure exactly what happened to it, but I shall not mourn its loss.

 

[prizzley]

My first "book" is still in my head and will probably stay there. I suspect that even in a parallel world setting it would have stretched the reader's credulity too far!

 

[Interference]

As soon as the first was done and dusted, critiqued and mauled, I started the second and third as more-or-less place holders for a proper bit of writing. Just enough to give me an idea what I was really trying to say and what I was actually saying. Sometimes the latter discovery was more valuable that the former pre-conception.

Anyhoo, then I re-wrote the beginnings of the first again and discovered layers I'd been too timid to pursue the first time around. I switched a key dramatic point, 180, which led to a discovery of one of the characters' motivations that I'd been completely unaware of. This is the fun of writing, I think. You can throw yourself curve-balls and find yourself in completely unexpected territory.

Any-anyhoo, I now have two opening chapters and a decision to make as to which comes first. Oh, and a new character I don't know what else to do with quite yet. Fun and frolics ahead, no doubt.

Incidentally, and this is probably ot, a bit, but I put off writing a book at all for decades. I was pretty sure descriptions would be my downfall, those un-entertaining bits that have to happen between lines of dialogue. Once I started, though, my downfall was not in writing them so much as in making them clear. On re-reading one of my first chapters a couple of days ago (written 2005), I found myself asking a couple of times, "Now, what did I mean by that?"

 

[MattC]

The first book I wrote was a 100k word dark fantasy story called The Forever Chain, written way back when I was 18 years old (1994). Essentially it was YA book about a girl who falls for the new boy in town, who has a dark secret (yes, this was written many years before Twilight). It involved schizophrenia, a ghost that will not rest, some metaphysical tom-foolery, and a police inspector out for vengeance. It was part Clive Barker, part King's The Body.

I submitted it to several agents and publishers at the time. Some were more charitable than others, but I did get a great response from HarperCollins who loved the premise but thought the writing wasn't strong enough (it was seen by more than one editor there, so it was promising). And it did introduce me to my current agent, Dorothy Lumley, so it wasn't a dead-loss.

Only now I'm glad it wasn't published. Despite teaching me a lot about the craft, it was so badly written, it's embarrassing ...

 

[MattC]

But if we're talking about first books ever attempted, then that's different. My first go at novel writing was attempted when I was 16/17 (about 1992), a book called Metallica Demonica. It was kinda Stephen King-lite (I was going through a phase then). It was filled with demons, vampires, and exploding gas-stations in a small town in the middle of the county of Cheshire. It was fun to write, but it was never finished as a modern horror-fantasy - I just didn't know how to finish it.

10 years later I picked up the basic plot, set in 1815 just after the Battle of Waterloo, threw in references to vampires, angels and clandestine plots in the church and came up with The Secret War, which was sold to Pan Macmillan, Random House (Germany) and La Factoria de Ideas (Spain). Sales were modest (around 9,000 UK paperback sales - not sure about Spanish or German numbers), but as a first novel that was aborted and then picked up and cannibalised years later, it did well as debut books go.

I guess I can't see much of the original book in The Secret War, other than the name of the main character, William Saxon.
Oh, and the demons.
There's still plenty of demons ...