First off, I’m a former googler, I worked there for like five and a half years so hi guys. So I’m wondering which mistakes you made as a beginning novelist that stand out the most as ones you’ve corrected as you’ve learned the craft better.
That’s an excellent question, I would say that my biggest mistake as a new writer was not being willing to revise. I’m a classic, what we call a one-drafter this is a type of author who likes to just imagine it, get it ready, plan a lot and then get in on the page and be done with it and that was a mistake, I do I’ve become a big believer in learning to take a book that’s a good book and make it an excellent book and doing a lot of strong revisions and early on I wasn’t willing to do that and that held me back quite a bit.
Do you think that maybe not having a writing group to back you up contributed to your lack of revisions?
Maybe… I actually did have a writing group, what I would do is I would get the feedback from my writing group and my opinion was “Oh, I made all these mistakes.” Instead of fixing them, early on I would say “Oh well, I won’t make those mistakes again for my next book,” cause I was always so excited an eager to write the next book and I -I didn’t slow down enough and really focus in on making books great.
And that was a mistake that was very particular to me, I don’t think- as a writer there are so many different ways to do this and so many different types of writers part of learning to be a writer is about learning what things hold you back and what mistakes you make and they can be very different. Depending on who you are and what type of problem you have.
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.