From The Heart

Writing your first novel-Some things you should know

About a six months ago I wrote a blog on biting the bullet. I had done everything I knew to do to get a novel that I had put years of blood, sweat, and tears into, published. It was a great story. I even had that confirmed by a literary agent, who gave it more attention than it deserved. It was time to get some help.

I had run into a brick wall and placed the piece of work to the side to gather dust. Maybe it was never suppose to get published. Maybe it was just a platform for me to sharpen my writing skills and produce the novel that was screaming to get out. As much as I tried to move on, I kept coming back to my flagship.

I finally turned it over to an editor not knowing what to expect. She started feeding me a couple chapters at a time with revisions and suggestions to make my work more marketable. She cleaned up the numerous structural and grammatical errors that I as well as friends had overlooked.

One thing that I learned through this process, is you can’t write in a vacuum. I produced a great story, but it wasn’t publishable. I couldn’t see the mistakes. I put years into editing, revising, and just trying to do everything myself. I did eventually reach out and pull in a couple of my closest friends, but they didn’t have the trained eye of an editor. They caught quite a bit, but they missed even more.

I should be submitting the story to literary agents again in the next few months. I have to admit, I’m both excited and anxious. But however it goes, if you follow my blog, you will hear about it.

Thanks for your continued support. I hope that the blogs I share help you to avoid some of my mistakes and are worthy of the time put into reading them.

-Jan R

From The Heart

7 thoughts on “From The Heart”

  2. I relate to some of the things being discussed….my first fiction novel took me sooner to write and edit than to find the first literary agent who could solicit a good response from a publisher….sometimes it was a weak book proposal and weak agent that played truant and at times it was the uniqueness of my first book that overwhelmed the publishing houses…then when one of the larger houses dared to take me on….everything changed….today i am a successfully published author and i can tell you it’s a remarkable journey….i have not done justice to sharing my experiences on finding a traditional publisher with almost minimal support before but would be happy to discuss it on a one-on-one with some of you who are convinced they want to and are willing to go the distance with their writing life….

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  3. aaronqdoe says:

    Reading your story I, unfortunately, get kinda overwhelmed.

    I am nowhere near even getting a solid novel off first base. I have a 50000-word piece of junk I want to shelve permanently. I want to start over with a story idea I can get passionate about. I get scared to think it may take years to write and years to push through all the hoops you are mentioning.

    I guess it all comes back to the quote I’ve read, “It’s better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and have no self.” I’m sure I just paraphrased it. I need to write for the enjoyment of writing and stop worrying about whether it ever goes anywhere.

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