The Gradual Improvement From My First Written Novel to My First Published Novel

In 2008, during my senior year of high school, I drafted my first novel. It was written by hand in a series of battered notebooks because I didn’t own a computer or have internet access at home. This might sound like the start of an inspiring underdog story—success in the face of adversity!—but the truth is that the resulting product, even after considerable revision, wasn’t very good.

(I Quit Writing, and Then I Wrote My Debut Novel.)

What’s worse, I didn’t know it wasn’t very good. I queried it to a handful of agents in the summer of 2010, following my sophomore year of college. Surprisingly, I did get one request for the full manuscript—and, less surprisingly, a subsequent rejection letter.

Then, something unexpected happened. During the querying process, I’d set aside the manuscript that I’d been constantly working on for the past few years, and once I’d accepted that my first round of queries had gone nowhere, I revisited it with fresh eyes, and suddenly realized that not only was it not very good, it was genuinely, offensively bad.

This is not humility. It was an incongruous mashup of genres, starting off as a slice-of-life drama before morphing into a Lifetime-esque thriller, along with a dose of what I imagined to be dark comedy (read: mid-2000s “edgy” humor) and an attempt at social commentary on issues that I lacked the life experience to meaningfully address. The plot was meandering and directionless, obscure allusions were shoehorned in without any thematic or plot relevance, and the protagonist was wildly unsympathetic, though I didn’t intend her to be.

How had I created such a monstrosity? Looking back now, what it boiled down to was that I had simply written whatever I wanted without any structure or rules.

But wait, you might be thinking at this point, doesn’t that sound an awful lot like your current book?

To that, I would answer: yes and no. Into the Midnight Wood—the fifth book I wrote, the fourth I queried, and the first to be published, in 2026—is indeed a blend of genres: part contemporary cozy-ish fantasy, part romance, and maybe a splash of rom-com, with the literary equivalent of an occasional musical interlude. The romance is slow, and nobody would call it plot-driven. It’s got its share of allusions, and the protagonist starts off quite unsympathetically with his disdain for his eventual love interest. Even more egregious, it’s filled with nonsense: Talking animals! Magic with no real explanation! Metaphysical realms! Time-manipulating mice! A federal holiday for Dan Quayle!

Yet this is the book that got me representation and a publishing deal. So what’s the difference?

The difference, I believe, comes down to the basic tenet of my writing philosophy: that you can get away with almost anything, creatively speaking, as long as you don’t do it badly.

In 2008, I did it badly. This time, I’d like to believe I didn’t.

That, I suppose, raises the question of what changed, of what I learned to do differently during the years in between. Aside from reading widely, I spent a lot of time writing but not finishing anything, jumping from project to project and genre to genre. I joined online critique groups, I experimented with short fiction and poetry, and, perhaps not insignificantly, I also practiced literary analysis in college and grad school. I sharpened my abilities to recognize what was wrong with my own writing, although it was a long process to develop the skill to fix it. I identified my strengths, but learned not to become over-reliant on them (for example, by leaning too heavily upon dialogue). I studied plot structure and practiced by reverse engineering outlines from published works. I figured out that my own process, against conventional wisdom, is to edit as I write and to continually revise my outline as the characters take the story in unexpected directions. Unwilling to abandon my love of allusions, I learned how to make them count.

I also queried two more books—an adult neo-noir romance with hints of magic realism, and a middle grade mystery that was half Enid Blyton parody and half Lemony Snicket knockoff. It was while writing and revising novel #4—my first attempt at YA as well as my first attempt at more serious fantasy—that I found myself becoming increasingly frustrated with the dual constraints of trying to follow genre rules and trying to find the line between YA and adult, especially in the current landscape where YA generally, and queer YA especially, faces intense scrutiny as to its “appropriateness.”

Into the Midnight Wood started, in a way, as a kind of absurd rebellion, an anything-goes, improv comedy approach where there were no rules except a refusal to reject any idea outright simply for being too silly. So while it looks like I did whatever I wanted, and to an extent, I thought that I was, I was actually applying a lot of what I’d learned in the time since my disastrous first novel: Outlining and adjusting the plot beats. Following pretty standard romance conventions, if perhaps in unconventional ways. Leaning into the protagonist’s less sympathetic qualities to make them comedically exaggerated. Letting the urge to make allusions inform character and plot. (This character is suddenly quoting Goethe in the original German, so how can I incorporate language and communication and barriers to both? This one is a fan of French art cinema, so how can that throwaway line lead, in a roundabout way, to a brief moment in which he lets his true feelings show?)

Will this exact approach work for everyone? Certainly not. In fact, if there is any universal truth here, it’s probably that most writing advice is not one-size-fits-all, as much as we might wish for hard and fast rules in a craft that sometimes feels impossibly subjective.

However, if I might presume to offer any advice to aspiring writers, it’s this: Learn the rules and the conventional wisdom, understand why they work for a lot of people—and then, throw them out if you want to, as long as you’re doing it on purpose and understand why you’re doing it. Don’t be afraid to move on from what’s no longer serving you, whether that means revising a planned story ending that no longer fits who the characters have become, discontinuing a critique partnership that’s run its course, or setting aside an entire project, temporarily or indefinitely, if it feels truly unsalvageable. Though it may feel like wasted effort, you’ve undoubtedly learned something from the experience, even if that something is an understanding of why it didn’t work, and this is knowledge that you’ll take with you as you go on to the next thing—and you must, above all, keep going.

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