How many novels until you get a good one?

MythMonger said:

Some people use the rule of thumb that you need to write 500K words before you're any good.

Mileage will vary.

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I hadn't heard this one before, but it fits my journey pretty well. I had heard that you need to write 10 books before you should release one (I think that comes from Oscar Wilde?)...which is rather disheartening to say the least, but...

My first novel had some good scenes/themes, but was way too narcissistic. 100k words down.

My second attempt was never completed, because I recognised that the narcissism was still omnipresent throughout the text. 30k words down (130k total).

I then spent over five years writing a futurist blog, that continues to this day with monthly thought pieces, and that has amassed somewhere around the 250k mark by this point. (380k)

I've also written and presented a number of papers/talks on a variety of topics related to special interest groups that I've been a part of. All together somewhere around 100k words. (480k)

Throw in all the essays, my MA thesis and other academic bits and pieces over the years...no idea how many words, but it has to push the total to above 750k.

I was then enthused by NaNoWriMo one year to start a new novel, and was able to take many of the themes and interests that I had picked up in my professional life, my academic career and writing the blog into this work. This is the novel that I'm now working on bringing to publication, and it really is significantly better than the first two. Worlds apart. Funnily enough, it does take some of the better scenes and a few ideas out of the earlier books - so even though they will forever sit unread at least some aspects live on!

I now feel ready to publish and call myself a writer, but it took somewhere around 750k words to get there - across both fiction and non-fiction. The next book will be even better!

blacbird said:

Crap. I'm doomed.

caw

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Nonsense. From what I've seen, you have incredible talent. It's shocking to me that no agent has yet recognized that.

To the OP:

It depends on how steep a learning curve the writer has. Some writers start at the top and some start at the bottom. You have little control over where you start, but a lot of control over where you end up.

Hopefully not too many.

My first book got me offers from agents but none from publishers. Second one wasn't loved by agents. (So I guess I regressed? MWAHAHAHA.) Third one got me an agent, but we're not in the subbing stage yet, so we'll see. There's already a fourth book in the works, just in the case the third one doesn't work out. If both the third and fourth don't work out...who knows if there'll be a fifth. I'm pretty tired of all the crushing disappointment.

blacbird said:

Crap. I'm doomed.

caw

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I don't think lack of talent is your problem. I suspect the stories you choose to write is why you have so much trouble selling anything.

Katharine Tree said:

I think it has a lot to do with how early the author submits her or himself to critique, and how well that author can absorb the critique. Very few people can write a publishable novel in a vacuum. A lot more can fix that first novel into a publishable state, if they take critique.

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My experience tells me teh exact opposite is true, and that the best possible thing new writers can do is write in a complete vacuum.

I've seen critiques harm at least nine writers for every writer they helped, and the ones they did help didn't really need the critiques in the first place.

Show me the average critique group, and I'll show you a lot of writers who not only won't sell their first novel, but who will never sell any novel.

Roxxsmom said:

Heck, even admitting that I'm not young and I wasted half my life not being serious enough about writing makes me sweat, because of all those people my age or younger I'm meeting now who who dug in and figured out how to balance their school, work, relationships, depression and so on and still have time to spend hours each day writing make me feel like such an imposter. I never had that kind of focus when I was younger, and I never had that kind of faith in myself.

I wonder if I do now.

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Madness and ruin lies down that road. Best not to dwell.

I've known people who dither forever about starting (anything, not just writing), and never do. Better to start late, than never. (Speaking as a fellow late-starter.)

Interfaced said:

I hadn't heard this one before, but it fits my journey pretty well. I had heard that you need to write 10 books before you should release one (I think that comes from Oscar Wilde?)...which is rather disheartening to say the least, but...

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It's more commonly called a "half million words of garbage" that we have to get out of our system before we find the good stuff.

It's not universal, or course, and, frankly, discarding your first nine novels is simply stupid advice.

far too many writers sell their first short story, or hit the top of the bestseller list with their first novel, for this advice to be worth a hill of beans.

I do think if a writer is planting his butt as often as he should, and actually writes while sitting there, it won't take very long to write half a million words, but in no way does this mean all those words will be garbage.

I finished my first novel when I was a teenager. It was a horrible action adventure thriller conceived from having read too many of the 1980s Mack Bolan books.
I finished my second when I was 19, a wish fulfillment action adventure novel that was also horrible.

The next novel I finished wasn't until I was in my late 20s. It's on Amazon, self-published but it's sold tens of thousands of copies and has a rating of about 4.2 stars.

So I guess three.

I wrote a couple of "novels" in high school that were terrible. (They were also very short to be actual novels, falling somewhere around 25k words each.)

In 2008 I wrote the first draft of a novel that would eventually secure an agent. But it took me six years of hard work revising (and writing some other stuff to hammer out some issues of craft) before that happened. (And when I say "revising" I mean I stripped it down to the bones of its plot and rewrote from scratch multiple times until I had a story that worked.)

Since then I've started two that each reached around 20k-30k words before I realized they have structural issues that have to be addressed before I can finish them.

I've also finished two more novels and polished them to a submission ready state. And started a third.

I've also written over 2 million words of fiction in the past 10 years (a drop in the bucket compared to some) and that has made a difference in quality as I've begun to work out the bad habits of story telling that plague most beginning writers and replace them with better ones.

So, for me, my first novel was my first "good" novel. But only because I didn't burn it when I realized how awful the first/second/third drafts were.

Jamesaritchie said:

Show me the average critique group, and I'll show you a lot of writers who not only won't sell their first novel, but who will never sell any novel.

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Others' mileage and experiences may vary, but this what I learned in three or four attempts to find a local or online critique group I 'meshed with'. The expected pace was too slow or too fast. The group was filled with folks who didn't write in or understand my genre - and yes, that does make a difference. The group was run as a private ego-boost club by the founding writer and their hangers-on. The group was founded by one person to magnify the writing of another person, a favored friend. Very few of the participants were commercially published.

So I stopped trying to find a group, and just wrote. I got far more useful information out of beta readers, editorial rejection letters, and my current agent's ruthlessly practical advice. Mind you, that was just my experience.

As for how many novels? The first one I wrote is technically publishable, but no longer fits the worldbuilding of my larger series. It's trunked, and I've used bits of it in other books.

My second book stalled forever. My third and fourth books got me an agent, but no sales: agent and I parted ways amicably in 1999, and those mms are now trunked for the same reason as #1. Fifth book won minor awards at some respected writing contests in 2011, but no agent or publisher interest - trunked for now. My sixth book was the one that finally got commercially published. I'm now working on #7, 8, and 9.

But I easily had my million-words-of-crap in my worldbuilding notes, short stories, and rewrites.

I'm a relatively new writer. I only started writing about two months before I joined this site, and the fact that I haven't finished a novel much less tried to get published yet may render my opinion on this topic null and void, but I'd like to give my two cents anyway.

gettingby said:

So, how may novels do you have to write before you get a good one?

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When I decide to do something, I do it to the best of my ability. If I don't want to give it my best, then I see no point in doing it. That's how my brain works. Therefore, if I decide to take the time to sit down and write a however-many-thousand-word-long novel, I'm only going to choose to work on an idea that I really love, that I really think is good, and I'm going to write/edit/polish up that baby up until it shines and is publishable.

Taking all that time to write a novel, even if it's only my first one, finish it and then say "this sucks", stick it in a drawer and never try to figure out why it sucks and fix it would feel like a colossal waste of time to me. Even if by fixing it, I have to make the final story look completely different from the original story, that's OK with me. As long as I can reach my goal of being able to proudly share it with others, knowing that I did my best, I'll be happy.

Now, I may write some short stories that I never intend to publish because I only wrote them as a sort of practice exercise, but I'll make my decision on the fate of those stories before I invest time in them. Then I'll take what I learn from the practice and apply it to the stuff I intend to get published.

I've written three novels since October. I didn't realize that by just the process itself was really an exercise in me committing to better writing habits and being true to my own voice. My first was 50,000 words in just a couple of weeks. I accomplished my goal of finishing a novel, which I hadn't really done before. But by doing so in such a quick time, it ended up being pretty horrible. It's getting a big makeover since I've always loved the premise. The second novel was a 120k fantasy. I flung too many different ideas into the story, and so I went back and focused on one stream and stuck with it. I thought about what I enjoyed reading (sex and violence, honestly) and injected that into the work. The result is a third novel that I'm going to send to agents. It's about 80,000 words, but half of it might go since it doesn't fit. Regardless, with this third novel I feel more confident about my own voice coming through the page. And I enjoy reading it, there were parts where I was like, "Hell yeah!" A good sign. Rewrites are manageable. My point being that my gut told me this will be the one (of many, because as soon as it's done I'm writing my next novel!)

gettingby said:

I have heard that for many their first novel isn't published. Maybe their second isn't either. So, how may novels do you have to write before you get a good one?

My first novel (and only) wasn't too bad, but it wasn't going to get published. Now, that novel is somewhere in a drawer or box, but I have no desire to do anything with it. My second attempt started to sound stupid. I thought my time would be better spent on other things than writing another bad novel. My latest attempt... I'm not sure about yet.

My primary focus is in writing shorter pieces. I like the feeling of finishing things. And if something doesn't come out as great as I had hoped, it is a lot easier to revise or trash it. I know my short-story writing has greatly improved. I attribute that to the volume of works I have produced. I almost always have a short story in the works, and I always, with a few small exceptions, finish shorts. I can clearly see now that it took writing a few bad stories to be able to write the good ones. Is the same thing true for novels? I just can't imagine putting a year or more of my writing time into something that might suck in the end.

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Funny, I just started edits on my second novel (I've written four, published only the third), and I'm amazed how far I've come with my writing.

When I'd finished writing the second one, I remember thinking, there's no way I can get any better! This thing is awesome! Now, re-reading it, I feel two very different emotions: 1). How wrong I was, how could I ever think this thing was polished! and 2). Wow . . . all my past work really shows in my latest story. I didn't make this mistake, that mistake, this one again, this new one, or that weird grammar issue . . . you see what I mean?

You get better at writing by writing AND editing AND reading. The clarity of my sentences used to be smudge . . . now the paragraphs and pages sum together into nice comprehensible pieces. A reader can safely dive into my stories without worry of getting lost. So, to answer your question, you should expect to churn out some crap that might not look like crap at first. But all rich and luscious lands must first be treated with that stinking pile of manure . . . how's that for an analogy?

Interfaced said:

I hadn't heard this one before, but it fits my journey pretty well. I had heard that you need to write 10 books before you should release one (I think that comes from Oscar Wilde?)...which is rather disheartening to say the least, but...

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When I first heard this, stated in a writer's forum with the absolute confidence of someone disclosing a fact that's so well known it needs no citation, I nearly gave up. I very possibly don't have the time to write ten trunker novels before I start selling, and I seriously wondered if I want to spend a large chunk of the rest of my life writing stuff that absolutely, definitely won't get published. And did I really want to spend so much time writing something that would, without any shadow of a doubt, suck horrifically.

But then I started hunting around, and I couldn't find numbers to verify this oft-cited statement. And while most of the published writers I know personally have a trunker or three, none wrote ten or more before their first was sold. And a number actually did sell the first one they finished and spent time polishing.

And then there's the 10,000 hours rule myth. This one is at least based on some data analysis (for musicians, not writers), but it's not terribly solid either.

Of course you have to practice a complex task a lot before you get good. But there's no set, magical number that is the same for all across the board, and there's no set criteria about what constitutes practice either.

You have to believe in your project. You also have to be willing to fail and to chalk it up to experience. But advice that tells you that there's a certain predictable number of hoops you have to jump through, is pretty misleading, and it can be destructive.

guttersquid said:

How many pieces of string does it take to reach the moon? One, if it's long enough.

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Which brings me to the comment I was about to make...

How long is a piece of string?

Thank you, guttersquid.

Okay. Here's the deal. You only need to write one... one novel to be published. Some people can do it - and have. Or it may take you a lifetime and you will never be able to produce anything publishable.

Most will fall somewhere in-between.

How do you know which one you are? You don't. So you just start writing and you keep writing until you get it right or give up.

JRBrule said:

Funny, I just started edits on my second novel (I've written four, published only the third), and I'm amazed how far I've come with my writing.

When I'd finished writing the second one, I remember thinking, there's no way I can get any better! This thing is awesome! Now, re-reading it, I feel two very different emotions: 1). How wrong I was, how could I ever think this thing was polished! and 2). Wow . . . all my past work really shows in my latest story. I didn't make this mistake, that mistake, this one again, this new one, or that weird grammar issue . . . you see what I mean?

You get better at writing by writing AND editing AND reading. The clarity of my sentences used to be smudge . . . now the paragraphs and pages sum together into nice comprehensible pieces. A reader can safely dive into my stories without worry of getting lost. So, to answer your question, you should expect to churn out some crap that might not look like crap at first. But all rich and luscious lands must first be treated with that stinking pile of manure . . . how's that for an analogy?

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That bolded part man, that's where it's at. When I finished my first draft I knew the first half was garbage, just because I could feel and see my improvement. Just put in the work one book at a time and get them out there. I honestly don't care how many it takes to get published, I'm just going to keep at it until it happens. One book, two, six, whatever it takes. If you learn something, and you should, one will get noticed. At least that's what I keep telling myself

I think the reading thing is overlooked surprisingly often. I've read voraciously all my life, and I think a lot of the rules of English have been assimilated into my subconscious as a consequence of this. Yet I run across people who don't read all the time, and sometimes they're trying to write. Just ran across another one a few weeks back. Confidently states that they know what fantasy novels are like, yet they've read hardly any, let alone ones that have been written in the past ten years.

This always baffles me.

Roxxsmom said:

I think the reading thing is overlooked surprisingly often. I've read voraciously all my life, and I think a lot of the rules of English have been assimilated into my subconscious as a consequence of this. Yet I run across people who don't read all the time, and sometimes they're trying to write. Just ran across another one a few weeks back. Confidently states that they know what fantasy novels are like, yet they've read hardly any, let alone ones that have been written in the past ten years.

This always baffles me.

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Baffles me too. How can you want to write if you don't love books?

E.F.B. said:

When I decide to do something, I do it to the best of my ability. If I don't want to give it my best, then I see no point in doing it. That's how my brain works. Therefore, if I decide to take the time to sit down and write a however-many-thousand-word-long novel, I'm only going to choose to work on an idea that I really love, that I really think is good, and I'm going to write/edit/polish up that baby up until it shines and is publishable.

Taking all that time to write a novel, even if it's only my first one, finish it and then say "this sucks", stick it in a drawer and never try to figure out why it sucks and fix it would feel like a colossal waste of time to me. Even if by fixing it, I have to make the final story look completely different from the original story, that's OK with me. As long as I can reach my goal of being able to proudly share it with others, knowing that I did my best, I'll be happy.

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This proves that there are too many variables for the rule to be correct.

I started writing my first novel when I was 12 and my second when I was 13. They didn't even have paragraphs. They were walls of text (scrawly, handwritten, atrociously spelled text) that went on through several exercise books.

I've been doing creative writing (mostly novels) ever since so I'm pretty sure I've written well over a million words by now. Most of them were probably not even spelled correctly.

All but one of my early novels and shorter stories have been consigned to the dustbin. The second draft of my second novel I've kept for posterity. It was typed up on a BBC micro wordprocessor and printed, but I never finished editing it and I'm not going to. The thing I'm most proud of about it is if it were a film it'd have an 18 certificate, meaning I would not have been allowed to watch the film adaptation of my own novel.

Point is that everyone has a different starting point, and if you start trying to write novels before you learn how to do paragraphs, it'll probably take you quite a bit more than a million words to get any good at it, but if you're already fully literate, well read, self-disciplined and determined to learn how to do things correctly the first time around you'll likely get there in far fewer words.

Regarding the million words/10k hours rule: Personal observation would indicate it has some validity. But it also doesn't mean that no words produced during that first million "garbage" aren't good. It means the ability to write at a consistent level of sellable quality increases the more you write. I found there was a marked difference in quality once I'd been writing consistently for a couple of years. It didn't mean that the stuff I wrote during those first couple of years couldn't be used, but most of it required a lot of work before it was sellable.

FWIW. I will admit that Brandon Sanderson's NaNoWriMo column about writing thirteen novels before he sold one was frustrating, but he eventually sold most of them, just not in the order he wrote them.

In the YMMV department, I am now 57 years old, I pulled out my first novel that I wrote about 6 years ago, and decided to my surprise that it wasn't half bad. Almost impossible to place, but not half bad. And I recently found a publisher who thought it was better than half bad. I wonder how many "rules" I'm breaking. Also, FWIW, I didn't get serious about writing until I was about 50. Just broke another gazillion rules. A bout of bad health knocked me out of the game altogether for four years. But I eventually picked myself up, dusted myself off and persevered. This old lady wants a career.

As for you, if you prefer writing short stories, write them. Who says you have to be a novelist? If you decide you want to try novel-writing again, the time you've spent perfecting your craft will make a huge difference. As long as you understand the essentials of plot and characterization, there's no reason you won't be able to write a fine novel if you can write a fine short story. But it's entirely up to you.

Brutal Mustang said:

Baffles me too. How can you want to write if you don't love books?

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I loved reading in the earlier part of my life, which I'm sure contributed to the skill level I'm at now. However, being a writer has made me enjoy reading a lot less. For one thing, I get sick of staring at words all day and the last thing I usually want to do at the end of.a long work day is read more. I also have developed a highly critical mindset. I find it hard to just sit back and enjoy reading anymore. I still try, though. Because I really do love stories.

I agree with many here who said mileage will vary. It may take ten novels or one. I suggest the biggest thing is understanding how the storytelling pieces fit together. Whether you pick that skill up instinctively, rewriting over and over or studying the craft, you gotta do it your way.

The biggest thing is honestly evaluating you're writing skill and the quality of your current draft. Then determine how you're going to close the gap to a publishable draft, the fastest way possible. Maybe that's through a writer's critique group, writing 500K words (I heard 1 million so the numbers are all over) or studying the craft in greater detail.

Just keep at it! It's not an easy road as you know, and make sure you get there your way!

I think that when one begins writing when older, in certain cases this can mean that one has accumulated more life experience, and this allows to shave off a few bazillion words in the learning period.

Some writers, including a few of my favorites, became full-timers in their early twenties, and since then have not had the chance (nor inclination, I suspect), for any more of that "real life" thing, with the jobs and the bosses and trying to find yourself and your place in the world crap, so basically what they accumulated in their late teens/early adulthood is what they have to work with in making characters come alive. Family relations aside.

All things being equal, when someone goes writer for real after adulthood proper sets in--then there's more stuff to put in. Like the reverse of rock music. Radical new sounds can be invented by people up to about the age of 25, and beyond that it's just polishing the craft, without any more new stuff to show the world--and that's more or less the rubicon beyond which a career as a writer makes sense, for the same reasons that being an authentic rock pioneer can no longer work--mileage.

IMO

When chaps like Robert Ludlum or Lee Child start at 40, or like Sidney Sheldon at 50, or like John Flanagan at 60, they appear to find their footing almost instantly. They have accumulated experience, and they know how to set priorities and how to focus and maintain discipline and have clear goals.