Newbie Novelists: Keep Fighting the Good Fight

For those of you who've been waiting all week with bated breath for my next blog post, I do apologize. I had decided to submit this post on Friday the Thirteenth, keeping with my belief that, in the spirit of my home-girl Taylor Swift, Thirteen is my new lucky number.
But alas, Friday, May 13th, 2011 will go down in history as The Day of The Epic Blogger Fail.
I trust this does not happen often, though I'm tempted to abandon this blog for the fancy graphics and user-friendliness of Wordpress. But that would be throwing in the towel much too quickly. And as you know, throwing in the towel is not what novelists do.
I began my journey as a novelist more than two years ago. "That seems like an awfully long time to work on one book" you might say, and you'd be right. It is. We won't even discuss the fact that the damn thing still isnt done. Sometimes i wonder if it'll ever be polished enough to satisfy me.
I realize there are novelists out there who are churning out two or three books a year. Stephenie Meyer took Twilight from idea to finished product in around ninety days. Elizabeth Kostova, on the other hand, spent more than ten years writing her magnum opus, The Historian. Both these ladies were Newbie Novelists.
Both went on to sign multi-million dollar contracts with Little/Brown, an imprint of Hachette, one of the 'Big Six' publishing houses. Both became huge bestsellers. Which one did it the right way? As it turned out, both of them did.

Stephenie Meyer practically chained herself to her computer, eschewing sleep and housework and most everything else in order to churn out the now iconic story that was burning a hole in her brain. Granted, it ain't Jane Austen, and it probably could've benefitted from a couple more edits. (Sorry, Twi-hards. It's good, but it's far from perfect.)Meyer herself admits that if she had it to do over again, she would've held on to her ms a bit longer to make sure it was as good as she could possibly make it. But in her excitement, she typed the words "The End" and almost immediately began shopping it out to agents. If you're Stephenie Meyer, apparently this method works. if you're the rest of the world, please don't do this. I think Ms.Meyer would advise the same.

Elizabeth Kostova agonized over her manuscript for years and years. She worked on it in her spare time--nights, holidays, weekends--sound familiar? But she wasn't willing to let it go until she felt it was absolutely perfect. Was it? Well, in my opinion, no. It was a great book, don't get me wrong. It was simply too long by at least three hundred pages. It was a real struggle for me personally, to get through the first hundred. If you can make it past that, the story is riveting. But I'm not sure how it ever held an agent's interest that long. In today's market, I'm not sure it would. From what I've read, the publishers were banking on this story becoming "The next DaVinci Code."  So perhaps for Ms. Kostova (and for Stephenie Meyer, for that matter) it was mainly a matter of timing. Truth be told, timing plays as much a part in an individual's success as anything else. 

I guess the point I'm trying to make is this---just as no one knows how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop, no one knows how many days it takes to get to the last page of your novel. It's different for each of us. Ninety days is way too much time for some people. Ten years isn't near enough for others. You can't compare your progress or your timeline with anyone else's. I'll leave you with a quote by William Faulkner which I think sums up the theme of this post perfectly:

"Always dream and aim higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Strive to be better than yourself."