Very recently a friend reached out to me and asked me how long it took me to write my first book. He was quite excited to start writing and had created a whole world for his story already. His enthusiasm was infectious and it was great hearing his excitement to start writing his novel. It got me thinking about when I wrote my first book and all the things that I had learned during that process but also the things I wish I had known or thought about when I first approached writing.
Writing what You Know and how that Works
There’s a saying that you should write what you know and I think that’s true to a certain extent. There’s an obvious approach that people might consider first which is writing based on your own life experiences. Personally I think this works for feelings and emotional aspects of a story, but not for literal events as it’s not really applicable for most people. But I like to think writing what you know is more applicable to writing the stories you know best. It’s always better to write the kind of stories that you enjoy best as that’ll naturally come out when you come up with the scenes and arc of your story. Trying to write a story that you don’t necessarily feel that connection to will often become obvious to the reader, especially when writing your first book. There’s conventions in the stories you’ve read and enjoyed that you’d be better accustomed to and understand.
Don’t worry about Being Unique
A really big concern I’ve noticed a lot of people have is that their story is just a copy of someone else’s work. I think it comes from an insecurity that a lot of writers have when taking inspiration from stories they’ve enjoyed. I believe this is the case purely because I also felt that way when I wrote my first book. I was worried my characters were too generic and too simple to stand out in a sea of other fantasy novels. The YA Fantasy genre is an incredibly popular and diverse selection of amazing books, it’s hard to truly stand out. Something I wish I had realized back then was that makes characters unique and memorable is the stories they’re in and what they do in those stories. I was really happy to hear how much people liked my characters, especially Asandra, as readers resonated with how her story played out in the first book.
Feedback is Incredibly Important, but only the Right Feedback
This is a bit of a tough one to resolve for most people as it can be really hard to find other people that can give helpful feedback. This was something I struggled with a lot with my first book as I reached out to so many people and got so much feedback I thought was all helpful at the time. The truth was that some of that feedback was really helpful and did help me to create a more effective story. But a lot of the feedback I had received was more trying to change the story I wanted to write to something that was more closer to what they would enjoy rather than the vision I had for this series. It wasn’t something done out of malicious intent, but rather that people know best what they really enjoy and often resort to that when thinking of how to improve a story. It’s good to always consider the feedback you get, but also recognize which will help you tell your story best.
There’s certainly a lot more technical things that could be considered in the process of writing your first story, but generally speaking I find the conceptual stuff always the most difficult to approach. I feel like tackling that often helps most. I do hope this helps those who are starting out writing their first books and I wish you all the best!
– Raphael
Raph's Cozy Musings 