Beautiful Town

This is the second novel I've written. Every writer has a first novel: awkward, unreadable, incredibly unpublishable. I'm no different.

I took a writing class one year, and had to write a scene - I can't even remember the assignment anymore. When the class was done, I still liked my scene, so I wrote another one to follow. And another one. And suddenly I was writing a novel.

I'm telling the truth here - and no one is reading, so why not? - when I say that I never, for one minute, thought of submitting the thing for publication. Publishing was what other people did. For six years, while working full time, I wrote the thing off and on, usually on. And I did everything, everything wrong.

Here's what I did:
-set it in New York in 1938, with only minimal research, making up the stuff I did not know;
-did not plot;
-did not plan;
-wrote the hero in first person and the heroine in third, switching from chapter to chapter;
-left in lots of bits of dialogue and backstory that did not further the plot, just because I liked them;
-made it a romantic mystery comedy, without in-depth study of any of these genres;
-wrote my characters into corners, then wrote them out again;
-described almost nothing;
-ended up with a plot so convoluted Raymond Chandler would have scratched his head;
-only finished three-quarters of the thing.

Every time I did one of these things, I figured I was doing it wrong. But I always said to myself, "What the hell? No one but me will ever read it anyway," and did what I wanted. And no one will ever read it, and it will sit in a drawer forever, a pile of writing mistakes.

I am insanely proud of it.

Because, you know, it still makes me laugh. There are sentences and bits of dialogue so good I don't even remember writing them; there are parts that are still funny and fresh; and I still love those characters and their crazy world. Sure, the point of view alone would make an editor nauseous. Who cares? I have decided that if I ever get to the point where people ask me for writing advice, I am going to tell them to go write an utterly unpublishable novel as practice. Only then are you ready to even start thinking of writing anything else.

Because I made all those mistakes - every one of them. And now I know why they're called mistakes, and what they feel like when they creep up on you. And I also know how it feels to write one sentence that is so original that it springs out at you from a page of dreck. And how it feels to read that sentence and say, I want to write like that all the time.

This is a craft. It is not for the impatient, and not for the really sane. We like to hide our mistakes and pretend they didn't happen, but every mistake is another lesson in craft, and every lesson is an achievement. Mistakes are part of the game.

Make 'em, and brag about 'em. I dare you.

Abby