My First Manuscript Took Almost a Decade to Write—And I Nearly Didn’t Finish It

It took a novel to teach me how to write a novel

When I started my manuscript (let’s call it… ALU, for no reason at all), I was around 15 years old and had no idea what I was doing. I’m getting deja-vu, I think that’s something I say a lot.

It was not my first novel, or even close—I’ve been writing novels since I could slap words together—but it was the first I felt like I was equipped to write. I wasn’t a kid anymore! I was a highschooler! I could do this!

(Spoiler alert: I could not... yet)

My earliest drafts were written in the Gates Annai patented (still pending) technique of throwing words on a page and seeing what stuck. It’s such a departure from what the manuscript is now that I could tell you anything about it and it wouldn’t be a spoiler. The FMC gets poisoned and commits blasphemy. There you go, see?

You could argue that it doesn’t even count as the same story, to which I say… have you ever heard of the ship of Theseus? If you slowly replace a novel piece by piece, at what point is it a separate novel?

At the very least, these early drafts were inspiration for what it would eventually become.

I wrote sparingly throughout highschool (I was busy with tech theatre alright?) but started writing in my spare time when I got into film school. Mostly just to try out the wacky advice they were giving us such as: “maybe actually develop characters” and “try planning out what should happen before you start”.

From here it started to take shape into the story it would become. It gained its theme, and it was titled by one of my oldest writing friends. It also got a Spotify playlist. All of these things have equal importance.

The aforementioned Spotify playlist

But around the time that I was thinking of not pursuing film any further and also panicking about what else I was going to do with my life, I started to doubt myself as a writer too. When you work on something for seven years, across about a million drafts (okay fine, around 25-30), it kind of takes on a life of its own. Parts of it were holdovers from earlier drafts across its entire 7-year life, and it felt so convoluted and complicated that I might never be able to pick it apart and turn it into something real.

So I gave up.

That is also Gates Annai patented (pending).

I gave up for a good couple years. I kind of tried to move onto a new project, but my heart wasn’t in it. For some reason, ALU just stuck in my mind. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, but I was so afraid of trying again and failing again, that I refused to touch it.

I usually don’t let people read my work until it’s as done as I can make it, but given I was never (ever) returning to ALU again, I let my best friend read the first few chapters.

It was one of the better decisions I’ve ever made because (drumroll please)… She absolutely loved it. With a fresh pair of eyes, she couldn’t see its history or everything I found too complicated and difficult to fix. She saw straight through to the heart of the story and nagged—oh sorry, I mean encouraged--me to finish it for like a year straight. She talked about it all the time. At some point I kind of just wondered if she was hoping to make the dedication at the start or something.

But finally, after a year of pressure, I thought I would just give it a read through. And maybe it was that I had gained a bit more experience or just had a totally fresh set of eyes, but I couldn’t see what had been so hopeless about it in the first place. In fact, I was pretty sure I could see what she did—I knew exactly what this book was trying to be, and how to get it there.

Then I wrote like seven more drafts.

And on that seventh newest draft, I looked up from my completed word document and thought... I've done it. This is what I’ve been trying to do all along. It was by no means perfect (I still had lots of editing and beta readers and more editing and professional editing and more editing to do), but I had a workable story in my hands. I had actually finished a novel—giving up is no longer Gates Annai patented (pending).

If it ever does get the opportunity to be published, I might have considered putting that best friend in the dedication—or at the very least, mentioning her by name in the thank you section at the end. Except she was one of my beta readers and never got back to me so due to spite alone I will only ever refer to her as “my best friend” or maybe at best, “B”.

You should have thought of that before you got “too busy with work”, B.

No matter what happens to this novel, it will always have a special place in my heart. The near-decade I spent writing it wasn’t just about writing, it was about learning how to write, how to make characters, how to plot, how to pace, how to create tone and voice and tension, you get it. The girl who started ALU and the girl who finished it are two different people with wildly different skills.

While I’m querying, I’m attacking a new novel and this one is going (believe it or not) a whole lot smoother. I may never again have to spend a near decade of my life writing one thing—and in a way, that’s a little bittersweet.

Me around the age that I would have been writing the first drafts of my manuscript