A Lead-Lined Box Comes in Handy

by Alan

What lessons did you learn from your first (perhaps, failed) attempt at a novel?

As you might expect, I made a lot of mistakes writing my first novel. A lot. A really lot. Like so many I couldn’t even count them, believe me. They were yuge.

I overwrote. I dumped backstory. I stubbornly wrote in complete sentences. I used adverbs. I made a million other technical “errors,” mostly because I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.

Here’s what I really learned during this effort: I needed to...