It may well
be that the flaws in an author’s first novel are among the things that motivate
him or her to keep writing. The sense that it was not bad but could have been
better can make a writer want to build on the strengths of the first book and
try to come up with a better second one.
Think of
writers who, to whatever degree, nailed it on the first try. Harper Lee, with To Kill a Mockingbird, and Margaret
Mitchell, Gone With the Wind, come to
mind. In her own way, and at her own level, each of them may have written the
best book she was capable of, and going on with fiction writing was sure to be
a disappointment.
Sometimes
an author overcorrects in the second book. In trying to improve on the
weaknesses of the first one, he or she can forget its strengths as well and end
up with a different but lesser work. Sometimes the third one is where the
author gets it right, as Fitzgerald did with The Great Gatsby.
The Mystery of The Mystery
After
publishing my first mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance, last year, I’ve been working on the second, which I
hope will come out in the spring of 2014. Neither of my books is in the same
league as the ones mentioned above; they’re intended as nothing more than
trashy entertainment.
But even
trashy entertainment has its standards and achieves varying levels of quality.
So I’ve been thinking a lot about this second book lately and wondering and
worrying about how good it is.
While The McHenry Inheritance received
generally good reviews on Amazon and seems to have sold a bit better than the
average first book by an unknown author, I felt that the characters and
dialogue could have been stronger and the story, though crisp and fast-moving,
could have been more complex. The second book relies on characters and atmosphere
more than it does on action. I’m trying to do something a bit different and
find myself constantly wondering if I’m pulling it off. The hell of being an
author is that you have to rely on your own instincts as you write, and it can
take a long time after publication to get enough feedback to know if you pulled
it off. That uncertainty and anxiety have driven many men and women to drink.
The Puzzle Leaps Into Place
One thing
that’s happening the second time around is that the elements of the story are
coming together more easily, and I’m getting more spontaneous ideas as I write
the book.
Before
beginning to write, I made pages and pages of notes about the plot and the
characters, going into considerable detail as to what would happen and who the
people in the book would be. Then, halfway through the first chapter, as one of
those characters was about to appear, I had a flash about a significant new
quality for that person that would alter some of the rest of the book. In
another instance, a New York Times article I’d just read rattled around in my
head and bounced off something my sister had mentioned when visiting recently.
The result: A key clue that hadn’t been in the original outline.
What to
make of those brainstorms, and other like them? The most likely explanations
are a) that I’m gaining the ability to write this sort of thing; or b) that I’m
losing the ability to recognize a bad idea when it pops into my head. It will
probably be a few years before I know which explanation is right. That’s the
hell of being an author.
