Tips Every First-Time Author Should Know

If you read my previous post, “A Few Things First-Time Authors Need to Know,” you already have a good foundation: writing takes time, you need structure before you dive in, and you’ll almost certainly need to rewrite your first draft. Those are the big ones.

But over the years, I’ve worked with hundreds of new writers, and there’s a second layer of advice that doesn’t come up until people are actually in the trenches. Here are a few more tips I wish every first-time author heard before they started.

 

Find your voice before you worry about style

 

New writers often ask me how to develop a “writing style.” My answer is usually the same: stop trying to develop one, and start trying to sound like yourself.

Style, in the way most people mean it, isn’t something you choose. It’s something that emerges after you’ve written enough that your natural rhythms and word choices start showing up on the page without effort. Readers can tell the difference between a writer who sounds like themselves and one who’s doing an impression.

The fastest way to find your voice is to start by jotting down the way you talk. Read your sentences out loud. If they sound like something you’d actually say to a friend, you’re on the right track. If they sound like something out of a textbook, you’ve probably drifted into performing rather than writing.

Having said that, your written voice will be a bit different from your spoken one, but that’s a good place to start.

 

Protect your writing time like it’s a client meeting

 

Most first-time authors treat their writing time as optional. If something else comes up, the writing gets bumped. The problem is that something else always comes up. Life doesn’t clear space for your book. You have to claim it.

I tell my clients to treat their writing block the same way they’d treat an appointment with an important client. You wouldn’t cancel a meeting with someone paying you money because you were tired or because a load of laundry needed doing. Your book deserves the same respect, even though it’s the one appointment nobody’s checking up on but you.

This doesn’t mean you need hours every day. One hour of protected, undistracted writing time will get you further than three hours you keep almost putting on your calendar.

 

Don’t allow self-doubt to be the deciding vote

 

Almost every writer I’ve worked with hits a point, usually somewhere in the messy middle of the manuscript, where they’re convinced the whole thing is bad. This isn’t a sign you should quit. It doesn’t mean you aren’t a good writer. It’s such a common part of the process that experienced writers have a name for it: the “middle of the book” slump.

Self-doubt shows up because you can finally see the gap between the book in your head and the book on the page. That gap is normal. Every writer, including ones you admire, has stood exactly where you’re standing. The difference between a finished book and an abandoned one usually isn’t talent. It’s all about perseverance.

Don’t let a bad-writing day convince you it’s anything permanent. Write anyway. Write through it and know you’ll revise later. It will work out. It always does.

 

Read like a writer, not just like a reader

 

Most people who want to write a book are also people who love to read. That’s a good start, but there’s a difference between reading for pleasure and reading like a writer.

When you read as a writer, you start paying attention to the mechanics behind the story: How did the author open this chapter? Why did you love that one scene so much you wanted to read it over and over again? When did you actually forget you were reading a novel because you were so lost in the pages? What characters did you love or love to hate?

Try picking up a book in your genre and reading the first chapter twice. Once just to enjoy it, and once to notice how it was built. You’ll start to absorb techniques you can use in your own writing, without too much thought.

 

Don’t compare your rough draft to someone else’s finished book

 

This one trips up more new writers than almost anything else. You read a published novel or memoir, admire how polished and confident it feels, and then look at your own messy, half-formed draft and feel like a failure by comparison.

Here’s what you’re not realizing: the book you’re holding went through multiple drafts, a developmental edit, a copyedit, and a professional proofread before it ever reached you. You’re comparing a rough draft to someone else’s fifth or sixth draft. That’s not a fair fight, and it never will be.

Your first draft’s job isn’t to be good. Its job is to exist, so you have something to revise. Judge it by that standard, not by the standard of a finished, published book.

 

Back up your work, and then back it up again

 

This tip isn’t glamorous, but I include it because I’ve seen what happens when it’s ignored. I can’t tell you how many people have told me that they lost hundreds of pages of work due to a crashed laptop or a corrupted file. These things happen more often than you’d think, and they can wipe out months of work in an instant.

Use cloud storage. Email yourself a copy. Keep a backup on an external drive. It takes five minutes to set up and it will save you from a kind of heartbreak that’s completely avoidable.

 

The bottom line 

None of these tips that every first time author needs to know are complicated, but all of them are easy to forget in the middle of the hubbub of writing a book. Find your own voice. Protect your time. Expect the doubt, and keep going anyway. Read with a writer’s eye. Compare your draft only to your own progress, never to someone else’s finished work. Back up your files.

Oh and one more thing, let your first draft be bad. That’s fine. A bad draft is still infinitely more valuable than the perfect book that only exists in your head. Every author you admire started exactly where you are now. The only real difference between them and you is that they kept writing.