5 Common Mistakes First-Time Novelists Make

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Writing a novel for the first time is probably one of the most daunting creative experiences in existence. Indeed, many first-time novelists have no idea how to approach it! This often means they go in blind—and end up making mistakes that seriously hinder their writing process, their novel, and their overall confidence as a writer.

And while learning from your own mistakes is a great way to cement those lessons, we can all agree that it’s not very efficient. So if you’re about to start writing a novel for the first time, here’s a quick catalog of five common mistakes that first-time novelists make, as well as how to evade them.

1. Starting without a clear purpose

A staggering number of first-timers go into the novel-writing process with no greater mission other than to, well, write a novel. It’s a noble quest, to be sure—but without any other purpose in mind for your work, you’re not going to get very far.

To avoid this fate, have a prolonged brainstorm/deep thinking sesh before you begin to draft. The question you ultimately need to answer is: what kind of story am I trying to write? Not just in terms of genre and plot, but what you want the reader to take away from your novel.

This might be an outright lesson about society, as in a book like The Handmaid’s Tale. Or it might be an impression of a time/place/feeling, as in Elif Batuman’s 2017 novel The Idiot. Perhaps you want to represent a group or experience you feel is underrepresented in literature. Your novel’s purpose could be just about anything, as long as you feel strongly about it.

But whatever it is, pre-draft is the time to get ahold of it—not halfway through your novel, in a frantic attempt to conjure meaning out of thin air.

2. Being unrealistically ambitious

While you should definitely have goals (like purpose) as you write, you don’t want to be too ambitious—i.e. if you’ve never written a novel before, you can’t go into it thinking you’re about to write the next Gone Girl. Unfortunately, many first-timers do exactly that!

Little do they know that being overly ambitious with your first novel is a one-way ticket to Writer’s Blockville, which is walking distance from Giving-Up Town. So don’t make your writing goals too lofty, lest you become too discouraged to actually meet them.

Instead, try this: make a list of 3 realistic and concrete goals to work toward as you draft, and tell yourself to disregard everything else for the time being. A reasonable set of ambitions for a first-time novelist might be:

Write X number of words in X days (say, 50k words in 30 days, if you’re feeling up to it).
Construct a relatively straightforward plot. 
Focus on one aspect of your fiction writing that you know needs improvement—characterization, pacing, dialogue, etc.

Keeping solid goals like these in mind will prevent you from burning out. Just remember, the most important part of writing a first novel is just to get it down on the page. As long as you’re still writing, you’re doing something right.

3. Trying too hard to be “literary”

Even seasoned writers often fall into the trap of trying too hard to sound “literary,”—like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Zadie Smith, or any number of renowned writers. Of course, it’s great to have role models, but not if you end up sounding unnaturally ornate and formal in an attempt to emulate other novelists.

The best way combat this “over-literary” effect is to carefully monitor your prose. Be honest with yourself: if you’ve written something just to sound fancy, not because it actually contributes to the story, cut it out. When in doubt, ask someone else to test-read your work and tell you if anything comes across as pretentious or unnatural.

It’s also good to consciously stay away from other literary works during the writing process, just in case of accidental osmosis. Or if you must read (we all know it’s a hard thing to give up), try picking up novels that are nothing like yours. For example, if you’re writing a slow-burn romance, you should be able to enjoy a fast-paced thriller without worrying about the style bleeding into yours.

4. Editing right after finishing

Countless successful writers and editors constantly remark on the importance of waiting to edit one’s manuscript. Yet after completing their first draft, many people dive right into the self-editing process without so much as a day’s buffer!

The result is a highly subjective—and therefore largely ineffective—editing process. You’re stubbornly attached to certain passages and subplots, and you’re so exhausted from writing the first draft that you resist the idea of revising. Basically, editing too soon after finishing your novel means you can’t get much of anything done.

Luckily, there’s an easy way around this problem: waiting a few days, weeks, or even months before returning to your first draft. While you may be eager to start sending your novel out to agents or other readers, trust us that waiting is the best thing you can do at this juncture.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that you can’t do anything else productive during the interim. You might research professional editors, or even start working on another project if you have the energy! The important thing is to clear your mind of that first novel, so that when you do finally go back to it, you’ll have fresh eyes with which to conduct a much better, deeper self-edit.

5. Never writing anything else

One of the worst mistakes writers make is letting their first novel also be their last. Yes, some people write novels just to see if they can, or to get a story out of their system, and they’re satisfied to leave it at that. But many more people just don’t think it’s worth the effort—especially if their first novel didn’t turn out as amazing as they thought it would (see tip #2).

Allow us to dissuade you of that notion. No one’s denying that writing a novel is hard work—but the work is worth it, as long as you don’t give up. The more you practice and the more novels you write, the better your craft will become. To paraphrase Ira Glass, your skill will eventually catch up with your taste; you just have to push a bit to get there.

So don’t stop writing after your first book, otherwise you’ll never know what you’re truly capable of creating. Learn from your own mistakes, as well as the ones we’ve outlined here, and keep moving forward—to your second, third, fourth novels and beyond.

Ricardo Fayet is a co-founder of Reedsy, an online marketplace connecting authors with industry’s best editors, designers and book marketers.