Your first Novel SHOULD Suck

[Yorth]

In my years in this writing community, I have received lots of advice. I met a lot of wonderful people who, without them, I would have never reached where I'm at today. On the same breath, I have given lots of advice to newbie writers. I would tell them which parts of their novels sucked, how they could improve them, and what opportunities they missed. And throughout those years, I learned that shutting up and saying nothing sometimes can be the best advice you could give. You see, anyone who spent 30 minutes reading writing blogs can go on and on about how this novel sucks and how it can be improved, etc... However, that is not going to help the one receiving the advice. In fact, the only purpose that has is to satisfy the "experienced writer"s own vanity. It's to validate themselves and bragging about their breadth and depth of knowledge.

That's why I no longer give specific feedback to new writers. I give them resources, but I never criticize their work. There is just too much to criticize. Letting them write, write and write is much more valuable than bogging them down with specifics. Letting them experiment, understand what works and what doesn't, will help them much more later on.

So, if you're a new writer, experiment to your heart content. Don't seek out criticism just yet. Just keep thinking of cool ways to write your story. Cool events, cool characters, interesting prose, all of that is going to be invaluable to you later on. Of course, when you decide to actually publish, you should seek criticism and edit your work. However, by that point, you would have already widened the breadth of your knowledge and all the criticism you'll receive will be much more useful. You would have specific things that you need to work on and improve. That is, my friend, much easier than just being told that every letter in your manuscript suck and that you should follow these thousand rules you have never heard about before.

 

[NiQuinn]

And your second, and your third, and your fourth. Hey, it could happen that successive stories are just so bad a little something inside you dies. It's okay though. My journey as a writer (RIP old stories. You shall never see the light of day again) is paved with heartache. Especially when looking back on my chunni days. Those experiences are gold. It's a learning curve. As many mistakes you make, you need to be conscious of them so you can learn. Even if only for a hobby. Mistakes are good. In fact, best to give yourself permission to make those mistakes. If you're too much of a perfectionist, the writing can turn into a heartless chore in no time.

 

[keitaro-sempai]

If you start writing and immediately keep thinking of every mistake you made, all those bad things, you may forget the good ideas and the like. Even at my oldest shot at writing, I find good and even cool things, if I didn't think that, I wouldn't have writed it in the first place. I'm sure every new writer can find those things as well, if they aren't drowned by negative comments.

 

[AliceShiki]

I'm not sure that's always a good idea, like...

The first time I tried publishing a novel online, I got some pretty harsh criticism from a friend (she didn't hold back at all... T.T) and I got super defensive about the points she was making and stuff, which kinda made her stop commenting altogether.

It was a big learning experience to me, like... About how to deal with criticism and about what she had said as well (because looking in retrospect, most of the criticism she made was super valid), and I'm really happy she told that to me, because it helped me grow quite a bit as a writer.

So uhn... I think criticism can be quite helpful, even when you're just starting.

 

[yansusustories]

Maybe I'm getting old but I think most first novels do indeed suck which is why it's probably not a good idea to post them online.
I think I only posted my third novel or something online and even then, there were still lots of things to criticize (many more than what actually was criticized). I'm happy for getting some of that criticism because it helped to make that novel better and taught me new things. Tbh, I wish there had been more because that would have made some things easier going forward. Even now, I sometimes wish people would be more open with their criticism because an author can become blind to the issues in their own story or their storytelling. Another pair of eyes often sees those things more easily.

 

[NotaNuffian]

First time online writer and someone who will be posting his POS work, frankly I don't want to post the story without someone to vet, but seeing how I have no one IRL to show my chunni... I am ready to get flame on all sides.

P.s. the work is bad, like, the author who is writing this is also think that it is bad. With google as my grammar and spelling editor bad, and the lacking of more sophisticated words in some scene is just terrible.

 

[GDLiZy]

If you are going in with the fear of failure, it might become a self-fulfilling prophecy. You will be writing to not fail instead of to success.

The title of the thread is like the murphy law. Everything that goes wrong will goes wrong, classic. But, it's also true that everything possible, given enough time, will happen. Your story, if given enough effort, will succeed.

Where is the threshold? Nobody knows. The traveller needs to look back to see how far he has walked.

 

[Devils.Advocate]

Just my two cents, but I think sometimes semantically, I catch myself thinking, I want criticism, cause it will help me.

But really, I don't "want" it. I need it.

It's like making a fictional character's motivation, the want vs the need.

I need criticisms but I don't want it. I don't want it, because it hurts to hear.

It hurts cause it shows how imperfect my story is, even though I know my story is not perfect.

So it hurts, to heart its faults. it hurts since I love it so.

So if my story is bad I will say I need the truth, I will hurt, but if it did not hurt I should not be writing it.



As a side note, my friends and I tend to separate criticism from critique and consider them to be different things

For us, criticism tends to be a more gut reaction, closer to a point of view a sense of taste.

But critiques tend to be a laid out breakdown of why something worked, how it worked and why something did not. It's often quite analytical and almost never a bad feeling.

Most people I have encountered that love the study of the literary, they don't tend to believe in rules... they are theories, murky guidelines. paradigm is to be acknowledged but challenged; so the feedback was rarely a reprimand but a suggestion.

Then again... whether getting good critiques and explanation of the literary theories early in a writer's careers is a good thing or not... That is a discussion for actual scholars and not I.

 

[Phantomheart]

*hides old fan fiction accounts*
too much baggage to account for man, too much. But yeah, if there no room for error then there is no room for growth. It’s trial and Error and we just learn from it :)

 

[Kldran]

One thing I realized from reading novels, was that many of my favorite authors wrote a ton of stories, and the great works they are famous for are a tiny fraction of the works they wrote. Thus, I concluded that the primary key to being a "good" author, is just being a prolific one. It's good to try and improve, but I think it's more important to just keep writing, than it is to get it right.

 

[BenJepheneT]

And the thing is... most authors edit and mark their own drafts quite a few times before sending it to an editor. I know writers who have never sent a draft earlier than fifth to an editor. I kind of get part of what Yorth is saying, but I also think that part of it is that you need to learn to critique your own work. Put it down. Walk away for a month or two if need be. Come back to it as a different person. Do all that critical reading yourself. It's an important skill to learn.

this is all this thread needs

 

[gaylolis]

i wrote my first novel back in middle school, but didn't complete it. I only remember the title and the rest is complete nonsense.

for the first one i published online, i barely remembered the story since it's quite long time ago.

did it suck or not, i probably don't care much. if i had fun with it and it feels worth doing, i guess it's alright?

and i decide which criticism helps me, if i feel it's too much pain, i'll just say it's not my thing. if i have to write in a way i hate just to make it 'good' i proably would have quit writing a long time ago.

 

[MrTiemos]

I can’t tell if the thread title is supposed to be insulting or uplifting

 

[AliceShiki]

I can’t tell if the thread title is supposed to be insulting or uplifting

It's supposed to make you realize you don't need to worry too much about the quality of your early works, and that you should instead just focus on the experience itself.

 

[MrTiemos]

It's supposed to make you realize you don't need to worry too much about the quality of your early works, and that you should instead just focus on the experience itself.

Uplifting then

 

[Alverost]

What if they all sucks, can I still be like @Ace_Arriande?

 

[Ace_Arriande]

What if they all sucks, can I still be like @Ace_Arriande?

Every single fiction there is simultaneously the worst thing ever and the best thing ever since it's all subjective

 

[Azrie]

Just like there are art styles, writing styles, there are ways people handle failure. I myself, am very afraid of failure, it's almost traumatic and irrational, it's the thing that keeps me productive, I simply don't want to fail. It's not that hard to understand, if you want to improve you will do so at your own pace, criticism helps you realize how truly bad some things are, and sometimes it makes it seem not all that bad in your eyes.

I remember my first review in RoyalRoad, my novel got absolutely roasted, I got roasted as an author. It kind of felt like a personal attack, I knew my novel was bad, but I did not think my value as a person was complete trash. Frankly, I cried. I am a very insecure person and constantly seek validation from others, just for them to tell me that it isn't so bad.

But I think the main thing to take away from this is to simply keep writing, no matter the criticism, re-read your own work and break it down, think of why something does not work or works. You are your own worst critic, however, if you see it as flawless then I believe that's when you should truly seek help from a critic or a harsh one at that. Sometimes we can enter denial, but it's never a bad idea to get a second opinion. I've noticed that after you get harshly critiqued about a mistake it rarely happens or it stops happening. Unless it's a style choice.

However, I think it all happens because of our desire to improve and nothing else if you beat yourself down about not being able to do something that's fine, but at least still do it. There is helplessness and then there is mediocrity, they sound so different and yet they can be the same. I hope I helped anyone.

 

[Ral]

It is better to not publish your first works in the first place. You are still unfamiliar with the medium so your first attempts are going to be more like experiments than actual work.

 

[LostinMovement]

By suck, do you mean fail? Because they are not the same thing, at least not to me. After all, it is not the author who determines the success or the failure of their work, it is the reader. Personally, I think as long as you bother to brainstorm and put together a decent, coherent plot and most importantly follow it, your story will okay. Even if your language is not that great and your writing style leaves much to be desired, at least your story is going somewhere and is conveying something. You can write amazingly and plot for shit and your story will still suck. Writing can be difficult but it can also be easy, it depends on how you think about it.