Top Yourself

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve talked to writers about problems in their book and they tell me about the cool thing they are “saving” for book 3 of the series. Or that they answer that question, but later on. Or that they have that all solved, but they’re waiting for a big reveal.

Um, no.

When you are writing a book, you are writing *this* book only. You put everything you’ve got into *this* book. You don’t think about any other book. You don’t care about any other book. There is no other book in the series. Because if you don’t get *this* book up to near perfection, there isn’t going to be a book 2 or a book 3 or anything else.

I know the fear. Yeah, that part I get. If you use everything up of yourself and your ideas in book 1, then what do you do for any of the other books in the series that may or may not sell and make you millions. Here’s the big secret of writing:

You have to make it up as you go along.

Yup. That means you don’t plan out book 2 and book 3 when you are writing book 1. You may hope to hell that you get to write another book, but you don’t get to save your best stuff for later. You have to depend on having better stuff later than you have right now.

The thing is, we’ve all read series where the writer petered out in books 2 and 3 and it makes us mad as readers. So as writers, we think that isn’t going to happen to us, right?

Yeah, well, it isn’t going to happen to you because your book 1 isn’t going to be good enough to get anyone to buy it or even complain about the rest of the books.

Sorry. I know it hurts to hear it. I know that you’re terrified someone is going to criticize you for the thing you criticized someone else for. That’s life as a writer. You are actually privileged if you get criticized like that. It’s a badge of honor because it means someone cared enough to get far enough to notice.

But you still don’t get to save all your best stuff for book 3. You have to grow as a writer. You have to stretch for the future and then you have to wait to see how people will react. You don’t get to control if they like you or think that your ending to book 3 was worth it. You give writing all you’ve got, and then that’s it. That’s all she wrote.