Inspired by Lucie's awesomeness, here's one of those pseudo-motivational talks you get at cons...
Three mistakes I made as a first time writer – and three I didn’t
For little reason other than having a story I wanted to tell, I decided to write a novel this year. I’d never written anything long or complex before – a few short stories as a teenager, and a couple of typically pretentious “experiments” in my university years. But a story had grown in the back of my mind, and I suddenly decided I wanted to tell it. That this coincided with my thirtieth birthday may or may not be coincidence. (As Commissioner Gordon didn’t quite say in The Dark Knight Rises: “You’re a writer now. You’re not allowed to believe in coincidences.”)
I finished my first draft six-and-a-half months after I started, and now, with a few weeks distance from my precious, I can start to look back at the things I’d do differently if I could go back.
ONE: KNOW YOUR GENRE
I was nervous about writing, despite the hook of the story digging into my imagination, so after I jotted down the first ten thousand words I sent them straightaway to a friend who’d said he’d review them. He was necessarily savage.
Despite having been an avid reader in my younger years, I’d read very little between leaving university and starting to write. Sure, I still consumed about a dozen books a year – but very few of them were in either of the genres I was mixing. I was putting together science fiction and crime – the two things I love most to watch in film or on TV – but I didn’t have the necessary grounding in the genres. Some of the major SF elements were soft and squishy, and they were butting up against the hard reality of a crime story. Not only that, but they showed an ignorance of those writers who had come before and explored those themes.
It didn’t make me fresh and dewy-eyed, untainted by the ideas of others – it made me naïve. To borrow a term from SF fandom, I was reinventing the wheel. The end result was that SF readers wouldn’t see anything they hadn’t seen before, and crime readers would balk at the overly-fantastic sci-fi elements.
My mistake was to not know my genre. Get your head into a ton of books by authors exploring stories and themes that interest you, and see what they did, how they handled things. It will inspire you, not put you off.
TWO: FLUFF IN THE MIXING BOWL
Writing my first draft was like baking a cake without a recipe. The extent to which this metaphor succeeds will depend upon whether you’re an outliner or not, but even though I had written a story summary before I headed into my draft, most of it was made up on the fly. The summary was a guide that would help me if I got stuck, but it wasn’t a scene-by-scene breakdown.
That in itself was not a mistake. I’d do it again, although I tend to err more toward planning than improvising. But methodology wasn’t my mistake. It was putting fluff in the mixing bowl.
About a third of the way into the story, I became worried that it was too short, too thin. So I invented, in a day no less, an entire subplot to “save” my work. I stuffed it in, and it duly thickened up the mixture.
But as I continued writing, and got further through the story, this subplot started to drag things down. It was a chore to write. The characters were a pain. I didn’t want to add the scenes I needed to so I could finish it off. I ended the first draft absolutely certain that I would kill the entire plotline with fire.
Adding that plotline didn’t stop me finishing the first draft under my target word count, nor did it create any of the lasting depth I wanted. As soon as I finished and decided to cut it, much better ideas for subplots grew in my head. And I’m going to give these time to mature before I write them in.
Inventing as you go can be a good thing, but adding something in just to allay a silly fear of having a thin story didn’t help me one bit. It was a silly thing to be worrying about at that stage in the process, no amount of fluff in your mixing bowl will make your cake taste good.
THREE: THE FIRST DRAFT IS NOT THE MANUSCRIPT
About two months into writing the first draft, I was already thinking ahead. “I’ll have finished this by October,” I said, “and I’ll have done the second draft by January. It’s only a polish – this is good stuff.”
The tears I’m wiping away now are mostly laughter.
The filename of my first draft was “manuscript.doc”. I’d spent far too long looking up how to format a manuscript for submission and was making sure I adhered to all those rules as I went along so it would save me time. I started planning who I wanted to be my beta readers, and which agents I’d submit to, and when I could give up work to become a “real” writer.
Oh, how I got carried away. What I’d failed to realise is how much work is involved in redrafting, and just how much work professional authors put in. It’s a classic amateur mistake! Worse, though, I was creating pressure for myself. “It has to be as good as it can be – right now!” That was the voice in the back of my head whenever I put pen to paper or fingers on the keyboard.
My first draft is awful. It has no structure, the plot is thin and incomplete, and characters change dramatically from line to line depending on my emotional state at the time of writing. But I’ve learned that this is ok. The same is true for most people. Even professionals. The trick is to put just as much effort, or even more, into the subsequent rewrites.
It doesn’t matter how you get there, or how long it takes, but you can turn that pile of incoherent rubbish into the story you’ve been dying to tell. It’s part of the process. A first draft is just that. And that’s no bad thing.
So I made some silly mistakes. Here are three I avoided, more by dumb luck than judgement.
ONE: I AM AN UNAPPRECIATED GENIUS, RIGHT?
The temptation to post my draft online so others could glory in its magnificence was strong at first. Surely, I thought, this is far greater writing than any other first-timer has ever achieved? It will be an inspiration to others and a beacon of light in the darkness. Plus I will have my titanic ego massaged by the kind words of strangers who cannot help but fawn over my masterwork.
Fortunately, sense overrode ego for once and I held off. The time and patience of others who might choose to help you by reading your work shouldn’t be wasted on half-baked words – they, and you, deserve your work at its best. And if they don’t like it, then you thank them politely and think about what they said.
TWO: A WORD A DAY
There’s a kindly fellow on the Absolute Write forum called Uncle Jim, who has three letters he swears by. With these three letters, you can write a book, he says. Without them, you’ll struggle. These magic three letters are B, I, and C.
Butt In Chair. Sit down and write. It doesn’t do it by itself. You have to make time for it and get on.
I have a full-time job that will eat as many hours as I throw at it. But because I made time for writing, I managed to complete my first draft. I set myself monthly targets, and with the encouragement of online friends, I met those targets every month until I was finished.
This isn’t meant to make those who struggle for free time feel bad. But writing will not happen without you sitting down and doing it. I’ll set targets for myself again, because without them I’d still be making up excuses for not writing that damned subplot with the dead vicar and his kleptomaniac ex-wife.
THREE: THE MILK OF HUMAN KINDNESS
I’m a fairly solitary person. I have a small circle of friends upon whom I rely, and I don’t mind spending long periods of time on my own. But the two best things I did while writing my first draft were to join some online communities: namely, NaNoWriMo and Absolute Write.
NaNoWriMo was the perfect starting place for me. I found a writing buddy there who still supports me now, without whom I wouldn’t have made it even halfway. I’m not sure I’m up to the challenge of fifty thousand words in a month, but there is an infectious enthusiasm emanating from there that gives me a boost every time I visit.
Absolute Write is the friendliest place on the entire internet. Don’t be cynical about how helpful and supportive people can be online. Don’t underestimate the encouragement that can be gained from watching others struggle with the same problems you have – and succeed. There is kinship, and chocolate chip cookies, and a whole world of procrastination available on AW, and without the people I met there I wouldn’t have finished my first draft.
There are more resources out there for writers than ever before. There is no excuse. If you have a story to tell, tell it. And NaNo and AW will help you.
I'm not sure I could handle that. 
I like talking to people in general, but pitching sounds high-stress to me.