does it mean you're a better writer if you've finished 10 novels than the person who finished 1?

ri$ky,

(yes, that's deliberate, what's up with the "@"? just curious if it is an issue from sending by phone or there's some other reason...)

what is the question?

If it is "can some be better writers with a single book than others who slave away and produce 20?" the answer is absolutely.....practice usually makes you better, but where you started out at, and your willingness to learn, count for a lot--some folks refuse to learn anything, and make the same mistakes 20 books in as with their first. Others have a stratospheric learning curve.

If the question is if agents worry about a second book, I suspect they are always aware of the risk, and that coupled with no premade audience is part of why a first-time advance is usually less than for an established author....they hedge their bets against the increased risk.

If you're asking if we've notices people who sold their first or second script, well, there always were folks like that...and folks like John Saul, who sold their seventh. There will always be both ends of the spectrum.

I always live by the thought that it's all about the quality not the quantity. I can write hundreds of books about a subject I have no clue about. Does that mean I know more than someone that actually knows about that said subject that published just one book about the subject. Of course not any one that says other wise is crazy. You can write book after book at any rate you choose to. The volume to which a person write is the least important factor. It all comes down to the point of whats written between the front cover to the back cover. If you can keep the quality high while still writing at a high pace per book. Everyone writes and publishes at their own pace.
thanks
the iron man

I always use Truman Capote as my outlier example, because he was actually writing publishable work as a teenager, work that has outlasted his life, brilliant work in his early 20's, and not "tw1l1ght". Of course, starting about at age 30, he also was painfully blocked, so maybe this early success is not something to wish for. But it does happen, rarely, that a first novel or novel by a teen or university student is actually quite good. And Mozart composed timeless works at age 6, but it doesn't mean you or I could have if only we had had a piano.

In my case, I've been published short many many times, so I know I'm publishable, and I haven't marketed longer work much at all. One I sent out thrice; another I sent out some queries for and gave up. To draw conclusions about the quality of my work based on the number of trunked books in my signature, after such desultory marketing on my part, would be silly. Personally, I would rather have good work in the trunk and burned with me at my death than have junk published. YMMV Publication of any old thing on hand isn't the only goal a writer might have. I wish I could take back one of my stories that was published because it really wasn't that good, and now it's out there, with my name on it, and there's no erasing that fact.

The marketplace does not always reward greatness, much less competence. I know a fellow with eight finished trunk novels, and they are all good, all feel-good gems of the Billie Letts/Lorna Landvik sort. And he can't get them published. I don't know why--maybe he sucks at queries. Maybe it's just crappy luck. Maybe it's because they are women's fiction and he's a man. Others will disagree with me because they like to think the quality of their work is what earned them publication and they're better than this fellow, and if that helps them sleep nights, fine. They're probably wrong, but far be it from me to disturb their sleep with a reality check. Good novels don't always get published.

I've been in critique circles for years, seen many good stories and novels that never sell, work far better than I'm capable of, and it has left me perplexed. Why do my merely okay stories sell and these terrific ones don't? It's such a crapshoot, trade publication. And that people who haven't been able to crack it go on to become bestsellers self-pubbing on Kindle proves that the trade publication system doesn't find every popular novel, doesn't it?

9999 out of 10000 people need to practice a lot before they are able to pen a publishable novel. If you're the 1 of 10000, good on you, mate.

Either way, BIC is the only way to get there.

^^
I agree completely with the above post.

risky said:

excellent post lorna. It just seems lately that 1 in a 10000 person seems to be on the rise especially in certain genres where the number of debut authors are high.

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Are we truly seeing debut authors in some cases or pseudonyms for established authors?

risky said:

@iron9567 i agree quality is very important and that writers should all strive to write to the best of their abilities. but in terms of being publishable and being a bestseller, having superior quality isn't exactly a number one requirement anymore. example is 50 shades of grey, even the author acknowledges the quality of her writing isn't great and is baffled by her success.

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This is the thing that has been the hardest for me to come to terms with as a writer.

Writers should strive to write to the best of their abilities. Most writers I've read agree with this. The readers really want a well-told, captivating, riveting story and if the writer has done that, the technical aspects of writing fall further down on the list of importance to the reader. They don't care about the writing as long as the story transports them. They'll even say 'the writing was pedestrian but the story hooked me' or something along those lines.

If the writing fails to do that, most readers immediately pick up on technical competency as part of the problem.

So the readers don't seem to care about well-written so long as it's a good story and it seems to set up a dreadful trap for writers who are lured by the 'well, then, my writing doesn't have to be good as long as I tell a good story' and stop trying to write well.

risky said:

It's sad but sometimes you think people deserve the success, they just don't get the chance.

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Not meaning to derail this thread, but I would argue that anyone who can write has a chance. I have a completed manuscript I'm querying to agents. If I get tired of waiting, I could have it published in a matter of weeks. The chance is there. Success, however, in terms of sales, advances, critical acclaim etc., is much tougher to assess and achieve. But the chance is there.

End of derail.

Yes, and no. You're better in that you've spent more time pounding the keyboard (in the hopes you've spent that time actually improving. I'd think most authors do improve over time (I know I have, and in spades), but if you're churning out more of the same shit with no critical eye for improvement, then no, you're only going to be more experienced churning out shit.

lorna_w said:

I've been in critique circles for years, seen many good stories and novels that never sell, work far better than I'm capable of, and it has left me perplexed. Why do my merely okay stories sell and these terrific ones don't?

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A vital part of the equation is persistence. Many, many people give up far too soon. Ten story rejections, twenty or thirty agent rejections, and they trunk the work.

Once I've done the best I can do on a story or novel, I market it until I run out of all possible agents or markets; then I let it rest until new agents or markets appear. Often greater experience and/or distance let me see a way to improve a piece. Then I pull it from circulation, revise it, and market again.

So, the failure of a work to sell ultimately comes down to its failure to hit the right desk at the right time.* The more desks it hits, the better its chances. Targeting the most likely desks can speed up the process, especially for a work with a specific potential audience.


* Unless, of course, it really sucks -- that is, it appeals to no one but the author.

risky said:

It's tempting to just shrug your shoulders and say 'meh' good enough. Sometimes you think why make the effort of polishing and revising, when maybe it's just okay to leave it at a certain point. as long as you have the idea down, perfecting the execution doesn't mean much anymore. your writing doesn't have to be great to do well, just decent enough to show you have an awesome idea. and it still sells. i'm really starting to see idea > writing.

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I'm going to disagree. 100%.

both matter, but writing is also a complex equation.....Dan Brown has horrible sentences; they make my retinas wish they were packing rape-whistles. But his pacing is very good for his genre and audience. Use his plotting and say Straub's or King's writing ability, and I suspect sales would increase. Let ishoguro or someone else who writes even better take the exact same idea and turn it into a plodding, slow book, and they'll sink it. So it isn't anywhere near as simple as "story trumps writing".

risky said:

@bearilou. they're actually proper debut authors and most of the are young. talking about early twenties here. this is specifically for the YA genre though. There's the being relatable component but also some of them write pretty darn well for their age.

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Ah. YA. Yeah, that has really come into its own in recent years. I have to wonder if what we're seeing with the advent of debut authors especially within YA are fanfic writers who've grown (whether in age/years or in writing ability) and decided to branch into writing original fiction. So while they're 'new' names, their experience is not quite as new.

And it doesn't help that right now YA is hot hot hot in terms of readership and sales (for which I'm very glad and so thrilled for the writers who've done well in it) so agents have quite a bit to choose from and are able to snag some pretty choice stuff.

I hope that 50Shades will do for the erotica market what Twilight did for YA.

risky said:

It's tempting to just shrug your shoulders and say 'meh' good enough. Sometimes you think why make the effort of polishing and revising, when maybe it's just okay to leave it at a certain point. as long as you have the idea down, perfecting the execution doesn't mean much anymore. your writing doesn't have to be great to do well, just decent enough to show you have an awesome idea. and it still sells. i'm really starting to see idea > writing.

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It really is tempting. Maybe a little disheartening for me but I persevere. I'd like to know that I will publish a good story and back it up with good writing. I can hope, at any rate.

Is the question "Does having more books under your belt make you a better writer?", or is the question "Why are Kat Zhang and Tahereh Mafi and other authors I don't think are very good getting big debut novels when people I know who write much better than them aren't being published?"

Because it kind of reads to me like question #2 disguised as question #1.

I'd say in general, writing is like any other skilled activity - doing more of it makes you better. Most writers' first books are not their best.

Also like any other skilled activity, some people are just naturally better at it.

Writing more proves you have the dedication and follow-through to actually complete things, and gives you more practice.

Also, I agree with quicklime that it's not all about story. Anyone can come up with a story.

risky said:

It's tempting to just shrug your shoulders and say 'meh' good enough. Sometimes you think why make the effort of polishing and revising, when maybe it's just okay to leave it at a certain point. as long as you have the idea down, perfecting the execution doesn't mean much anymore. your writing doesn't have to be great to do well, just decent enough to show you have an awesome idea. and it still sells. i'm really starting to see idea > writing.

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Lots of logical fallacies in this post. Survivorship bias is probably the biggest.

Imagine a hypothetical publishing world:

It has 110 aspiring authors this year. 100 are capable of producing a decent-but-not-very-good book, sort of like the one in your example—they each have a 10% chance of success. 10 are capable of producing very good books—they each have a 30% chance of success. (10% and 30% are both *averages* of all of the members of the sets' chances of success.)

How does this pan out? On average, 13 books get published—10 of them are decent-but-not-very-good, and 3 are very good.

So our intrepid aspirer, Author McAuthorson, hoping to join the ranks of the 110 next year, looks at this and says, "Wow, quality doesn't matter that much. 10 decent books vs. 3 very good ones. Sigh, execution doesn't matter that much. Most of the books getting published aren't so great." He settles for a decent-but-not-very-good book.

Our more crafty writer, Smarty McProsepants, correctly identifies what's going on: more mediocre books might be being published, in this world, but that's only because comparatively fewer people are capable of good writing.

Who would you rather be? Smarty McProsepants or Author McAuthorson. 30% or 10% chance. Easy answer. Even if Smarty McProsepants' advantage were only 11% to 10%, you'd rather be him.

But wait. On the sidelines, we have Skeptic Skeptikowsky, a staunch supporter of the Ten-Percenters, who's ejaculating, "Whoa. I don't believe that flapdoodle! This whole hypothetical is flawed. If I know I have a winning idea, something that I know will be Twilight successful, my chances are much higher than 10%!"

Well Skeptic Skeptikowsky's claims are bunk too, because if one could actually predict with any reasonable degree of certainty what's needed to guarantee a Harry Potter-level huge bestselling success, or even a third of it, becoming successful at this writing thing would be really fucking easy, wouldn't it? But it's not.

I think this question is so subjective, because what is "finished"? Does "finished" just mean you wrote "the end" on your NaNoWriMo novel? Or does is it mean you've polished a novel enough to put it out on submission? If it's the former, I've written seven novels. If it's the latter, I've written two. (And even then, one of those is questionable, because I stopped querying pretty early when I realized it just wasn't ready.)

I do believe you can learn how to write a good book with one novel. You're just going to spend a lot of time on that one novel. In fact, the final version of said novel may bear no resemblance to the original draft other than the main character's name. And that's okay, if that's where you want to focus your efforts. Or you can scrap your first novel as soon as you realize what's wrong and try again on a new book. It's your own style.

No, more books =/= better writing. More books, where each consecutive book is an improvement over the last in terms of structure, plotting, characterization, etc = better writing.

Also, your stats are off for the authors you've mentioned by name.

Some people write quickly; some write slowly. Neither is an indicator of quality. The person with a grasp of grammar and basic storytelling is going to produce a more readable manuscript than someone who doesn't, even if they can put out six books a year and the other writer slaves over theirs for three years on a single title.

There are other factors to consider, as well. Is the "better" book in a "dead" genre. It's still possible to get a vampire novel, for example, published, but not likely to the fanfare one would have caused a few years ago. Is the style experimental? That can affect a publisher's willingness to publish it. And there are a ton of other factors that have nothing to do with speed.

Amadan said:

Also, I agree with quicklime that it's not all about story. Anyone can come up with a story.

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I'm calling fowl on this one. Anyone can come up with a good concept, not everyone can tell a good story.

Pippi said:

I'm calling fowl on this one. Anyone can come up with a good concept, not everyone can tell a good story.

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they can come up with an idea, but that's the point: TELLING a story is the actual writing and execution.


So no, idea does not outweigh execution. I've tormented my kids (lovingly) with bizarreness from texting them "Fear the Oomoo!!! Fear it!" without ever explaining what an oomo might be to informing them that their next spill at the table would cause me to knock an eye clean out of their head, and then their school pictures would just look silly, in the hops it would help them to think around corners, and it works: my nine year-old can tell stories, on the fly, about made-up imaginary friends as fast as you question him....good, solid stories without gaping-assed holes...weird shit about Jamaican Jerry from Nebraska, who was killed when a plane hit him while walking in the park...he's just really fucking quick.

But he's nine. and not a prodigy of Beethoven, or rain-man, proportions. So great as his ability to come up with ideas and stories may be, he certainly couldn't write a novel. He doesn't know enough basics of sentence construction and things like showing vs. telling. and tempting as it is to say those things do not matter, they do.

Amadan said:

Also, I agree with quicklime that it's not all about story. Anyone can come up with a story.

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Tommy the UFO was having a tough day at school. Being a UFO at a school full of humans wasn't easy. He always felt left out, as if he was an alien.

A cat crept out of the bushes.

"Meow," it said to Tommy.

Tommy said, "Beep beep. Blurrrp. Beep. Beep boop beep."

"Meow meow meow?"

"Beep beep."

The cat led Tommy to the playground. The kids all aww-ed at the cat. What is he up to? Tommy thought. Trying to make me feel more alone?

Then the cat strapped himself to Tommy's glass pod and rolled down a sign: Tommy the UFO-cat.

From that day on, Tommy was the most popular kid at school. A cute girl even let him abduct her. The cat strapped himself to Tommy every day, and Tommy basked in his new-found popularity.

But one day the cat spotted a fowl—he was tired of the school's Graham Crackers—and got lost on the way to school.

What am I going to do now? Tommy thought. Oh well. He wobbled out to the playground, expecting things to return to normal.

"Hey Tommy," a girl said.

Tommy tilted his head himself downward, just wanting to disappear. No one could like him now. Things would go back to the way they'd always been. The way they always should've been.

"What are you waiting for?" she said. "Come eat breakfast with us."

"But," he said. "I don't—"

"Hurry." She smiled. "And I like your haircut."

Tommy's lights flickered in a rainbow of colors. He didn't need a cat hat, he realized. He never did.

I agree it is about execution. But if it's so easy to tell a story why are there so many books with such bad excuses for stories in them, am I just unlucky in what I'm reading? And yeah a kid's story is going to be entertaining, but lets see you turn that story into a movie or a novel. There's going to be massive plot holes, things that happen for no reason, a lack of motivations, etc. The difference is the importance someone places on story. Different people will have different concepts of how much plotting is acceptable for it to constitute a story depending on how much importance they place on it. Different strokes for different folks, all art is subjective and until people come to terms with that they're going to do their head in chasing after their spot on the bestseller list.

Pippi said:

I agree it is about execution. But if it's so easy to tell a story why are there so many books with such bad excuses for stories in them, am I just unlucky in what I'm reading?

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Anyone can tell a story; not everyone can tell a story well.

Name any "bad" book, and I will argue that it's got at its heart a fine story in the hands of a good writer. A vampire who falls in love with a high school student? A symbologist who uncovers an ancient Catholic conspiracy? A bunch of shallow twenty-somethings chilling on the Jersey Shore? An extended BDSM romp between a virginal ingenue and a billionaire with mommy issues? Put any of those stories in the hands of the right writer and I'd read them.

Amadan said:

Anyone can tell a story; not everyone can tell a story well.

Name any "bad" book, and I will argue that it's got at its heart a fine story in the hands of a good writer. A vampire who falls in love with a high school student? A symbologist who uncovers an ancient Catholic conspiracy? A bunch of shallow twenty-somethings chilling on the Jersey Shore? An extended BDSM romp between a virginal ingenue and a billionaire with mommy issues? Put any of those stories in the hands of the right writer and I'd read them.

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Those are concepts not story, but I'm sure a lot of people would disagree with that. But perhaps we've been in agreement all along and just disagreeing because we use different words for the same term.

Pippi said:

Those are concepts not story, but I'm sure a lot of people would disagree with that.

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In this context, we are referring to the original comment:

It's tempting to just shrug your shoulders and say 'meh' good enough. Sometimes you think why make the effort of polishing and revising, when maybe it's just okay to leave it at a certain point. as long as you have the idea down, perfecting the execution doesn't mean much anymore. your writing doesn't have to be great to do well, just decent enough to show you have an awesome idea. and it still sells. i'm really starting to see idea > writing.

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which asserted that story (i.e., idea) trumps writing.

Telling the story (i.e. execution) is the writing.