Two First Novels, Ten Years in the Making

NPR, on Weekend Edition, recently discussed the writing process with newly published novelists.

From the piece...

The writing process is not for the faint of heart, says novelist and editor Colin Harrison. And he should know: His own first novel took five years to complete — and was then rejected by everybody. Fiction writing promises years of obscurity, little money and no guarantee that anyone will ever read what you write. But many fiction authors — Harrison included — keep at it.

"Although I didn't realize it at the time," Harrison says, "[Rejection] was a fantastic stroke of luck. Because that first novel that I had worked so hard on was terrible — it really was."

In Harrison's case, that first unpublishable novel served as a painful but valuable training exercise.

"[It] probably flushed a lot of writerly poisons out of my system," he explains. "And then I had to go on and start something new." That something new was Harrison's Break and Enter, the first of his seven wildly successful, published novels.

Though there is no formula for a successful first novel, the writers who make it through tend to be mulish, or obsessed with a single event or idea.