A new blog about writing a novel and getting it published
On the sixth day of the sixth month of 2026, I typed the final words of my first novel, saved the document and turned off the laptop. After a slow creation over twelve years, nine years of intermittent research and constant distraction and three years of writing, I thought I had finished it.
But it wasn’t the first time I thought I had finished it. There was the time a couple of months before, and again three months before that, when I had proudly sent the “finished” manuscript to a famous agent I once knew, but a few days later after reading it he sent it back saying that “he wanted to love it but couldn’t”. By then, having read through again what I had sent to him, I sympathised. I realised that I couldn’t love it either. Even the politeness of his rejection made me read the text once more — in the new guise of a suspicious but empathetic third party with a new frenzy of forensic scrutiny — I concluded that I had been mad to think the novel finished or that it needed no further work.
If I am to be brutally honest, there was a worse moment even before that, some six months previously, after I had spent several weeks telling people who enquired after my progress that I had finished “90%” of the novel and was now just “tidying it up”. This I now admit was a outright lie, for I was playing for time after gradually realising the truth of a nearby comment that the biggest problem faced by first-time novelists (and particularly by historical novelists was that they did too much “telling” and not enough “showing”.
That’s easy to say, I thought, but I found it difficult to swallow, still more to digest, and most of all to break the habit and write more showily. But it brought me back from the sofa to the desk; to the manuscript which I checked for the new and worrying filter: how much telling was there? Was my slip showing?
It didn’t take long. The bloody thing suddenly read like a dusty history text-book. I was horrified. I could even allow that parts of it were boring in the way that history books often are.
My cheeks were flushing red with embarrassment, even though no one was aware of my secret shame. (My dog was aware but didn’t care). The subsequent rewrite was painful. It felt more like self-imposed English grammar classes than passionate romantic thoughts vouchsafed on vellum. I felt the physical force of a boot on my neck pushing my head down towards the screen. Those weeks changed my body shape.
In each case when I had thought I had finished my book, the overwhelming sense of finality had been lacking. They all felt like false finishes. After the first false finish I came back to the text and cut away no less than a third of the novel – over ten chapters or about 100 pages. This was because I had also realised that I had been writing two different novels for the last two years. Worse still, when I removed the alien chapters, there was embarrassingly little to do afterwards in tying up loose ends, smoothing over the seams, and checking on the tittles. The only benefit seemed to be that I had half my next historical novel already done and drafted.
On the second false finish a month or two later, I realised that I had left a character stranded in the complicated undergrowth. It affected quite a few other characters so I changed text in those places that seemed to need it while giving the character a decent conclusion (bankruptcy). But in realising and correcting this I felt hopelessly careless and lazy, as if I had forgotten to put my trousers on before stepping outside. But my conscience had again nagged me after I had breasted the tape. Or was it because I had decided rather than realised that the manuscript was finished?
The third false finish ironically turned out to be the novel’s critical denouement. I had set the finished text aside to cool like a newly baked cake for a fortnight, determining to come back to it in one glorious consecutive non-stop read-through. Only in this way could I assure myself of the masterly continuity and alignment of theme, style, characterisation, voice, and tone.
But it didn’t take very long in the reading of the nether pages to find that I had quickened the pace alarmingly and unnecessarily in the last five chapters. Somehow it now read exactly as if I was tired of writing the damned book and had simply rushed everything through in short order to get to the pub before closing time, so to speak. It was like a distinguished slow-moving film had suddenly encountered a glitch in the spool and had accelerated absurdly near the end, rendering the whole thing completely risible. Another whole chapter was needed near the end, a fuller description of the circumstances and environment, and a longer and more detailed ending were bleeding obvious. I went back to work feeling like Muttley.
When I finished, I instantly worried that the manuscript still was not good enough to be published. I still found non sequiturs, bad phrasing, a lack of application in explaining something complicated. I wondered if I was suffered from a perilous lack of focus or concentration, as my family are wont to mention. I had written the book wherever I found myself: in France, Switzerland, Malawi, and multiple locations in England. But the last few months to which I now refer took place in my personal garret in the shoddy loft conversion of an Edwardian terraced house in Uckfield, East Sussex.
I imagined myself to be on the home strait for at least the fifth time. But I can’t say it was painful in all respects. I never once starved in my loftice. Mornings were late and were early ended as I descended each day around lunchtime after a couple of hours of tinkering upstairs to toss together a salad or eat leftovers from the fridge. Afternoons were too often frittered away on administration, tax calculations, word games, doom-scrolling through bookish posts, and a myriad of other things to do — then I wondered how it had suddenly become 6pm and time for a well-earned drink downstairs after my daily Herculean labour, dominated as it was by distraction, doubt, and despair.
But the real difference became obvious shortly after I had put down my pen on that sixth day in June, even then with a foreboding sense of yet another false finish. A few days later however, the scenery changed. I received an email from a publisher, whose identity I will not reveal) confirming that they would publish my book, based on the draft that I had sent them when requested several weeks previously (and therefore not precisely the draft that I had just completed).
It felt very odd. Something had been lifted from my shoulders. Without that letter, I would probably have acknowledged the latest false finish and climbed the steps with a heavy sigh back to my loftice. But now I had a golden ticket hidden in my pocket. My edits could be made in a luscious freedom from worry because a publisher had decided that a previous draft was good enough for them to give the green light.
I rushed off a letter of thanks and a reminder that I was still working on the draft and would send it completed within a few weeks. This immediate self-awarded delay did not worry them. They replied, claiming to look forward to seeing the final manuscript in due course and proposing a draft contract for me to study in the meantime.
I went abruptly from the agony of uncertainty to a sunlit plateau of affirmation and entitlement. I was, after all, a proper author, not just an intending or pretending one. My promised further edits would consequently not be desperate rush jobs but nuanced and intelligent amendments to settled narrative, plot, and structure. But I could not help feeling slightly fraudulent.
I suppressed that thought and looked forward to high-browed correspondence of the editorial phase, as well as supplying ideas for the cover, my most flattering mugshots, and other materials for future publicity. Having once myself worked for a respectable and famous publisher, I wondered what the publishing scene looked like nearly fifty years later. It was already obvious that it had changed massively. Anyhow, there would be plenty to learn. I was sure that there would be doses of triumph and disaster along the way. I had never heard of the publishing company which had favoured me but was relieved to find that it was existent, staffed by publishing-type people, and was apparently trading in books. My early suspicions were partly allayed.
In fact, I felt a wave of gratitude. I had made it to the shore, was on the beach, and still breathing. Above all, I was happy in the awareness that the next edit would be shared be others, and this made me more content. It gave me more encouragement and an increased sense of importance and acceptance than I ever had when I was just hoping to be chosen from the scrawling multitudes of would-be novelists.
The Claw had chosen me. After a few false finishes, I was on the way to publication and posterity. There will be much more to come…