A Bad Book is the Beginning

You have written a book!

Do you know how rare and wonderful a thing that is?

Do you know how many people say they are going to write a book and never do it?

Why don’t they do it? Because writing a book is a lot harder than it looks. Even writing a bad book.

I would argue that writing a bad book is like running a marathon. No matter what your time is, you’ve still run a marathon, which is an accomplishment. And why do people ask about your marathon PR anyway? Isn’t that rude? Like asking someone what their bank account numbers are.

Writing a bad book is the way you write a good book. I promise it is. Every good book was once a bad book. A bad book with promise, I grant you, but still a bad book.

Every great book has once had someone reject it. Someone once shook her head and said—this will never be published. Someone once told the author to give up and do something else more productive with his life.

Reread your bad book and decide for yourself if you want to revise it. You don’t have to. You can choose to write another one and revise that one instead.

But know this: writing a book from the first sentence to the end, with the same characters throughout, who go through experiences that affect them, where the events lead to some sort of climax however half-assed it is—this is an accomplishment that not many people can say they have done.

Celebrate.

Eat and drink and be merry.

And then get back to work. Because of the one in a hundred people who write novels who say they want to, only one in a hundred of those finished novels will ever be worth reading.