How I Wrote My First Novel: Prologue
By: Jodi Compton
Tags: Success, Writing Life, Creativity, Writing

How I Wrote My First Novel: Prologue

From early ambition to Bantam Dell, in a nutshell

Photo by Anete Lusina via Unsplash

“How I Wrote My First Novel” is a short series about, as you’d expect, the process of writing my first crime novel, The 37th Hour, and getting it published. It’s meant to help aspiring novelists — especially those who work in genre, and who have publication as a goal. It’ll progress in generally chronological order, with each subtitle being a frequently-asked question about the novelist’s process.

However, if you want a summation, the whole story start-to-finish with a bit more biographical detail and less focus on technique, here it is.

My career path was set in near-stone from, approximately, birth. My mother was a special-education teacher, and her niche was helping kids with reading difficulties. When I was a baby and toddler, she worked from home, teaching neighborhood kids to read. My crib was in the corner of the living room.

When I was older, she told me this story:

She was driving to the store, with me in my car seat. I was two years old. Out of the blue, I said, “Fine food.” My mother was briefly confused, until she saw a billboard by the road advertising a supper club. The prominent, largest words at the top were Fine Food.

So yeah: Pretty soon, I was one of those annoying kids who read Animal Farm at age six, under the confused notion that it was not so different from Charlotte’s Web. It helped a lot that my father loved crime novels and spy thrillers, and my sister loved to read, too. By the time I was seven, we were into my dad’s Spenser novels, by the late great Robert B. Parker. We’d stop in our reading to share our favorite lines aloud. One of my sister’s was an exchange about the ID photo on Spenser’s PI license. It went: It’s my bad side, to which another character responds quizzically, It’s full face, and Spenser just says, Yeah.

We both thought that was hot stuff.

Getting ready

In short, I grew up reading and talking about the books I was going to write someday. That “talking about” phase went on far too long — into my twenties. Years in which I wrote very little except for what was required for school. There were a few stabs at it, in those notebooks with a black-and-white cover that looks like a QR code, or on my mother’s cast-off Smith-Corona typewriter. But I never got serious.

This was, in part, due to unhelpful messaging I got from the world around me about how novelists have to rack up a lot of life experience before they’re ready to start writing. But I can’t blame outside sources entirely. A lot of it was overconfidence — what today we’d call entitlement. I felt that as soon as I was ready to start writing, success would fall into my lap.

These years weren’t entirely wasted. I got a B.A. in English — not Creative Writing, a distinction I’ll go into in a later post. An English or Comp Lit degree will teach you a great deal about writing. After the B.A., I went to graduate school to learn journalism. This goal could have been much more easily served by double-majoring in college, or simply majoring in English and working at the university newspaper (which is the actual path to learning newspaper journalism).

This is clear to me in hindsight, but back then, the whole ethos was radically different. Today, people are starting to ask whether a university education is becoming obsolete. College dropouts, and even a few high-school dropouts, are at the top of their fields. But in my youth, dropping out of high school was dropping out of society. You had to have college, and the Holy Grail was an MBA or a law degree.

So a master’s in journalism made perfect sense at the time. I’d be an excellent crime and courts reporter, then settle down to write crime novels at about age thirty.

Reality check: I wasn’t an excellent reporter. I wasn’t even a good one. Reporting — finding the news out in the wild, without logging onto a computer, turning on a TV or cracking open a newspaper — is a wholly different skill set than writing. I moved down a step to editing on the copy desk. Copy editing is proofreading stories after the city desk is done with them, writing headlines and sub-headlines and photo captions, laying out pages, choosing wire stories and photos for the national and international news. This, I was reasonably good at, though I made some stupid mistakes, chiefly because of the fast pace of a daily newspaper.

More to the point, though, copy editing gave me access to four newswire services, which meant fascinating stories from around the globe, both crime-related and otherwise. Plus, I had a settled routine with plenty of downtime. Somewhere around that time, I decided it was time to get serious about Job One. I was 28 years old. It was time to write.

Getting going

I started with a few short stories, but that phase didn’t last very long. I’ve written about why this wasn’t a fruitful avenue for me, but a factor I left out of that story is that there just isn’t a large market for short stories by authors with no name recognition. A novel was the White Whale, and it wasn’t very long before I started writing one.

That’s where the story actually gets a bit dull. By which I mean, I was having a very good time, but there aren’t any fascinating anecdotes from this time period. I didn’t join a writer’s group; I didn’t have a mentor, I didn’t travel for my research. I just wrote. The copy desk, at the newspaper, ran on a four-days/ten hours schedule. So, on my three days off, I’d try to write for about three to four hours. Often, I was guilty of starting later in the day than I usually intended.

At the time, I lived in a studio apartment with a loft accessible by a ladder, and often it’d be near nightfall when I climbed that ladder. Once I was finally up there, it wasn’t too hard to get to work. The loft was extremely small — about eight feet by ten feet — so there was nothing up there but my desk and chair and a small library of reference books. It was like climbing up into my brain.

If daily procrastination was an issue, the writing itself wasn’t. My first novel, The 37th Hour, came fairly easily, with my only concern being one of length — I wasn’t sure it’d reach the 70,000- to 90,000-word mark that major publishers want, especially in a first book.

Getting published

Landing an agent was the difficult part, as it is for most unknown, first-book writers. I received about fourteen to seventeen rejections from agencies. (I know the exact figure is supposed to be burned into my brain, but it just isn’t). What I do remember is that after getting those rejections, all via the postal mail, I found an email in my inbox with the subject line BLUE EARTH, my working title for the book. At first, I thought a particularly modern agent had chosen to email a rejection rather than mail one.

That wasn’t the case. This agent wanted to see the full manuscript. That was the moment at which I knew I’d have a writing career. People have asked, “How could you know, when he only wanted to read the manuscript?” I can’t tell you. I just did.

This happened on Halloween day, which became a personal holiday for me, as well as a general one, from that day onward. That night is a vivid and pleasant memory: listening to my printer laboriously shuttle out the pages, with occasional paper reloads, while I watched reruns of Halloween episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and ate those autumn-colored Hershey’s kisses, the ones with russet and gold foil wrappers. (Sidebar: The company discontinued those this very year, 2020. I’m still wearing a black armband. Seriously, Hershey? “Vampire” kisses with strawberry filling? Gross).

The prospective agent, a careful and assiduous man, made no promises. He also asked for a few rewrites, but nothing disconcerting to me. We also realized, jointly, that I’d left out a chapter in my printout of the manuscript. This wasn’t immediately obvious because it was a near-standalone chapter of backstory. It also might have contained the best writing in the book (my estimation, at least). Certainly, when the agent read it, he was notably more enthusiastic about the whole project. When he called me one day in the spring, asking for my biographical information and my personal preferences in an editor — well, if you want to get technical, that was the moment I knew I had an agent. He sold the book to Bantam Dell a few months later.

That’s not the end of the story, as all writers will tell you. But it is a good closing point for this “how I did it” summary. Or, as Stephen King might put it, this Annoying Autobiographical Interlude. The stories that follow will be more nuts-and-bolts about the process; I hope they’ll be useful. But some people like to hear the story as A Story, and it’s for them I wrote this summation.