The point is to learn how to write anything book-length, and the first one you write, actually reaching THE END, may need to be your trial run. You really need to see if you can do this first, and that book, with all its warts and scabs, could show more of your flaws that you care to reveal.

Most successful writers have a novel that didn’t get published.

“I wrote two books with this poet character, neither of which was published, but the important thing is it taught me I could write a book. Maybe not a publishable book, but a book with a beginning, middle, and end. …I (learned I) love being in the middle of novel and knowing where I’m going next. Taking that long path.”

~Peter Swanson, the Sunday Times and New York Times best-selling author of eight novels, including The Kind Worth Killing, winner of the New England Society Book Award, and his most recent, Nine Lives.

Peter Swanson, in an interview with CrimeReads.com (https://crimereads.com/shop-talk-peter-swanson-on-why-hell-never-outline-a-mystery-novel-again/), now can write for a living. His first two novels, mysteries about a poet, landed him an agent then a publisher. Then both quit their jobs and left him with nothing. He couldn’t find another home for the stories.

So then he wrote a thriller. It couldn’t sell. So he backed off and wrote a novella, which got picked up by an ezine, in which an agent saw it and asked if he could turn it into a novel. And that’s what sold as his first book.

I wrote Lowcountry Bribe ten years before it was published, only as a memoir. Then as a murder mystery in third person. It would not sell. I threw it away and wrote it from scratch, again in third person, then when it couldn’t pass muster in a critique group, I threw it away and rewrote it in first person. That book was written four times as a totally different entity…different plot, different genre, different characters. My first book didn’t need to be published. Neither did the second and third versions of it.

But it took all of that writing and all of those versions to find my voice and learn how a book is supposed to be written.

Just because you finish a book doesn’t mean it was meant to be released into the world. Sometimes those early books are your journey toward the one that matters. Think hard before publishing prematurely or you could ruin your reputation and a chance at that future masterpiece. Once published, it’s out there forever.