Land the Plane
Why you absolutely should not share the unfinished first draft of your novel
Here is the rule: you have to finish a full draft of your novel before you share any of it with anyone.
Do not share pieces of your novel until the first draft is done.
If you have already broken this rule, it’s not too late to repent. Stop soliciting feedback, stop workshopping chapters of your novel, and write like hell till the last page.
Normally, I’m against writers recommending their “process” to anyone. Your process is whatever works for you. But in this case, I am right and all other approaches are wrong.
Let me see if I can prove it.
When you query agents with your novel, most will ask you to send them the novel’s pitch (in the form of a query letter) plus the opening pages (usually the first 10-20 pages). If an agent likes the sample pages, they’ll request the full manuscript. And if the agent reads and likes the full manuscript, they’ll offer you representation.
Notice that the offer of representation does not come after the agent reads your first twenty pages. Every single agent will expect you to send them a full draft before they can consider taking you on as a client.1 Why is this? Because a novel cannot be evaluated in partial form.
Agents know that the quality of a novel draft is often uneven. The opening chapters tend to be really sharp, well-paced, full of good zingy lines. This is because the writer has reread the opening chapters a million times, every time they start back at the beginning of their book to revise or to figure out where to go next. Also, writers know that agents will evaluate the opening chapters of their novel before agreeing to read the full, so writers rework that opening obsessively until it shines.
After the opening, things tend to go a little downhill. Sometimes the descent is as smooth as a good sledding hill. Every subsequent chapter has been read over by the writer fewer times than the preceding, so that by the end of the book, the final chapter has been reread maybe once or twice. Typos increase, inconsistencies sprout, and characters suddenly find themselves in a huge rush to say the important thing or have the important epiphany. Reading a full draft of a novel, you get to see the whole spectrum of the writer’s talent: from the writer at their most revised to them at their untamed wildest.
This is for the best. If agents made offers of representation on only the first twenty pages of a novel, nine times out of nine, they would feel bait-and-switched when they received the full manuscript. Of course the ending is going to be worse than the beginning—for the reasons above, and also because endings are hard. And don’t even get me started on middles. Agents know that the only way to meaningfully evaluate a novel is to read the whole thing.
It goes beyond writing quality. Even if the first twenty pages of a novel are fantastic, they’re fantastic conditionally. The first twenty pages are the writer planting seeds, which is exciting because the reader starts to anticipate all the lovely plants that might grow by the end of the book. If the writer then immediately bulldozes and blows up the garden in a nuclear explosion, those first twenty pages of seeds become just a reminder of some wasted promise. You can’t answer the question, “Is this a good novel?” from the first twenty or fifty or even two hundred pages. It is a good novel, if the way it ends realizes the potential of the way it begins.
Okay, so you can’t meaningfully evaluate the entirety of a novel from a sample of it. But aren’t there still good reasons to share partial drafts of a novel before the novel’s done?
Good reason #1: Before you finish the novel, you want to take the reader’s pulse on whether it’s working, where they want it to go, what they like best about it.
I get the thinking here. It takes a long time to write a novel, and even longer to revise a novel. This can seem like a time-saving maneuver: I’ll just get some feedback now to make sure I’m on the right track. So you send the first hundred pages to a trusted friend and ask them to tell you, honestly, what they think.
In the absolute best-case scenario—where your friend thinks the hundred pages are sharp, interesting, riveting, original, full of promise—your friend will say something like, “This is great!” and “I hope we find out who killed that guy in Chapter 3.” Your friend may be able to point you to some threads that need to be tied up by the end of the novel… but you probably already know about those threads, if you’ve done such a bang-up job of writing the first hundred pages. So even in the best-case scenario, the most you’re likely to get out of this interaction is praise, encouragement, and a few open-ended questions.
Guess what you’re going to get if your friend doesn’t like the first hundred pages of your novel? Praise, encouragement, and open-ended questions.
There is simply no way to be honest with someone who is in the middle of a novel draft. “I don’t think this premise makes sense,” “I don’t want to spend time on the page with this main character,” “I just find it boring”—no one is going to tell you this when they know you’re still actively writing away. Because, after all, maybe the novel will get better, or maybe they’re not the right reader for it, or maybe they’re confrontation-averse. No one wants to be the reason you give up on the novel you’ve been pouring so much time and excitement into.
So while it can feel like you’re taking the temperature of the room by sharing around the first hundred pages of your novel, the likelihood that you are going to get honest feedback is extremely low. And if you did get honest feedback, it wouldn’t be good for you or the novel! The heart of the novel is probably something you haven’t even gotten to yet in the first hundred pages, and if you’re asking an honest and critical person to evaluate that novel before it even really gets cooking, they’re going to say something devastating that saps your enthusiasm for the whole project.
Your first hundred pages aren’t good and they’re not supposed to be good. You’re still clearing your throat—you’re still figuring out where the story is. Don’t take the risk of someone puncturing your good idea before it even gets off the ground, and don’t trust any praise you get on an unfinished project. It could very well be honest praise, but also—what else were they going to say?
Good reason #2: You totally understand that you can’t get a fair evaluation of the whole story when it’s not finished yet, but you still want an evaluation of the prose.
Again, I see the appeal. Whatever mistakes you’re making (abrupt transitions, overdetermined characterization, monotonous sentence rhythm) in the first hundred pages of your novel, you’re almost certainly making throughout the rest of the draft. So this can seem like another good time-saving maneuver: get a sense of where your prose is going wrong (and right) in the first hundred pages, and then apply those lessons as you continue with the rest of the draft.
The trouble is, I guarantee you will not want to continue drafting once you’ve received feedback on the first hundred pages. You’re going to want to go back and fix those hundred pages, and then you’ll feel ready to continue the draft, now that the foundation feels a little more solid.
But, just to be sure that you really fixed the foundation, you’ll share the new-and-improved first hundred pages with a different friend, to see how they’re landing now. And that friend will give you some useful and insightful feedback, and you’ll realize that in order to properly finish the draft, you simply have to go back to the beginning and do a full revision on the first hundred pages, and then you’ll be ready to…
So many novelists get caught in this loop. The pernicious thing about this loop is that you really feel like you’re making progress on the novel—and yet, as the years pass, the novel never makes it past sixty percent complete. The early pages get more and more polished, and meanwhile the end of the novel begins to feel more and more daunting and distant, because the quality of every new scene you set down has to live up to the quality of those first hundred pages, which have been reworked now probably six or seven times.
You try to add a new chapter, but it doesn’t feel right, it’s clunky, it’s not working. You get stuck. You get stuck for a long time. And then you think: honestly, in order to even get back into the right headspace to work on this, I’d better start back at the beginning and read it all through…
Good reason #3: You’re stuck.
This is the reason I have the most sympathy for. Sometimes you do get stuck writing a novel. You scribble out some outlines, you write dozens of scenes that go nowhere, and you end up back at the same halfway point. If I could just do some brainstorming, you think, with a reader that has read the first hundred pages and can bring a fresh eye to the whole thing…
That reader probably will be helpful in a brainstorming session. But they’ll also tread carefully, for the reasons mentioned above. They’ll help you treat the symptoms, but they might not point out the disease. Because what good would it do? You’re trying to get unstuck, not blow the whole thing up again and start over. The more honest your reader is, the more likely they’ll point out some deep flaw in the novel’s premise—which means you’ll have to go back, untangle the whole thing, and start again. You thought you were fifty percent of the way through the draft, and now you’re back at zero.
I think it’s so much more useful to brainstorm with someone who hasn’t read a single word of the novel. Explain the story to them, explain where and why you’re stuck. They will come up with ideas way outside the box of your own plans. Some of these ideas will be very good. They will be the kind of ideas that no one would dare suggest after reading the first hundred pages, because they’ll take so much work to implement. But in an idle brainstorm, your reader will toss off these excellent ideas without fear that they’re blowing up your book or poisoning your enthusiasm, because after all, they haven’t read your book. They can offer an idea and you can shoot it down without either party’s feelings getting hurt.
Good reason #4: You’re in a workshop or an MFA program, and the novel-in-progress is what you’re most excited about, and you need to share something for people to give feedback on, so why not this?
I do not think workshopping chapters of a novel is ever helpful. I don’t think workshop is the right format to discuss a novel. I’ll reiterate: no one wants to shoot down a project you’re still actively working on. This is why it’s nice to bring short stories to workshop: they may not be “done,” but they’re complete, and there’s no risk that an especially harsh piece of criticism will cause the story not to exist. This is however very possible with a novel, and no one wants that blood on their hands.
Don’t workshop your novel. Write some stories instead. Take one of the characters from your novel and write a bonus, standalone scene that you workshop as a story. If you’re in a situation where you absolutely must, gun to your head, workshop chapters of your novel, try to steer the conversation toward prose and away from story. A roomful of very intelligent, perceptive writers who have just read Chapter 12 of your novel can have nothing meaningful to say about your novel’s overall trajectory.
If your reaction to this is, “But I don’t want to write short stories—I want to work on my novel!”, consider whether you need to be in a workshop or MFA program right now. If the novel is the thing you’re most excited about, to the exclusion of all other forms of story, take a semester or two off and finish the draft. Then you can come back and cleanse your palate with some short stories, or you can bring chapters of your (finished!) novel one by one into workshop and see how people react.2
Good reason #5: You have an agent, and you want to make sure they’re on board with the project before moving ahead with it—otherwise, you’ll waste years writing a novel they don’t want to represent.
This is the tricky one. Yes, agents can save you a lot of time by telling you point-blank, “That premise will never sell.” Agents are in fact the only people who will tell you this. I know of authors who, before embarking on a new book, send their agent 3-5 possible premises to see which one the agent thinks they should tackle.
Agents are also pushy, by nature and by job description, and are known to hassle clients for material long before it’s ready (“Anything I can read yet?? Can’t wait!”). So there are many circumstances in which it might seem logical to send the first hundred pages of an in-progress novel to your eager agent.
The great risk of sending an in-progress novel to an agent is that, if they dismiss it out of hand (“No good. Do you have any other ideas?”), it will ruin your excitement about not only that project but all writing projects. Setting aside the idea you were really obsessively, pacing-around-the-room gung-ho about to work instead on some premise your agent thinks could sell (Ratatouille, but instead of cooking, it’s real estate!) will be a mercenary drag at best, and at worst, it just won’t happen: your creative brain will refuse to cooperate.
A very well-published author friend of mine lost years this way. An agent shot down the idea she cared most about, and she tried to leave it behind… only to produce absolutely nothing in the years that followed. The only way she could get out of her writing slump was to write the thing she had wanted to write all along… which, of course, ended up being a huge success.
Because the other problem with letting agents weigh in on your fledgling book is: agents are often wrong! Or they might be right about the first hundred pages, but wrong about the eventual form of the book that you haven’t even conceived of yet, let alone reached.
So yes: it can be useful to run ideas past your agent before the long labor of book-writing begins. But only if you feel yourself to be at a genuine crossroads, equally excited about multiple ideas. If you know what you want to work on and you’re excited about it, don’t wait for an agent’s permission to begin. They can’t properly judge something that doesn’t yet exist.
Let’s say I’ve convinced you not to share pieces of your novel before the draft is done. What are you supposed to do—just keep grimly battling toward the finish line, even though you know the beginning is a mess, even though you have no idea how readers are going to take it, even though you feel sometimes like you’re insane for putting so many hours into something that might prove humiliatingly unintelligible to anyone besides yourself?
Yes!!! Exactly.
Finish the draft. Finish it quickly, if you can. You’re on a tightrope mid-cartwheel. This is not the time to look down. Bat away your doubts and paranoia. Tell yourself, I’ll deal with that once the novel is done. Of course you’re going to have to fix it. But I promise you that your novel will be easier to fix once it exists.
Sometimes, it’s true, you will get stuck. Sometimes the reason you can’t move forward is that something snagged back however many pages ago, and it’s just going to keep unraveling the further you go. When this is the case, delete the last paragraph you wrote. If you’re still stuck, delete the last scene. Delete the last chapter. Keep deleting back until you find the last place where you felt excited about the novel. Start writing again from there, do something different, and hopefully this time you won’t hit a dead end.
The closer you get to the end of your novel, the more you will feel that you’re flying a plane that is on fire. Half the controls are broken and the radio is out. Your job—really quite an urgent job—is to land the plane. Not to fix the plane or put out the fire. Just get the plane to the ground, in a crash landing if you must.
There will be plenty of headaches ahead—putting out the fire, assessing the damage, seeing what can be salvaged. But those headaches belong to a future self, and that future self is not your concern. Right now, you’ve got one job. Finish the novel, and then we can talk.
Coming up next week: a newsletter about the editing process and the golden-rule order of operations. The week after that, a very long post on how to find an agent.
Questions, comments, concerns, confusion, condemnation, all always welcome.
Exceptions include: if you’re already a big-deal writer with a massive platform; if the agent reached out to you first because they’ve read your other published writing; or if the agent is convinced that someone else is going to snap you up fast and they want to get in there first. Even in these cases, the agent might still wait for a full manuscript.
I still don’t think this is the right way to edit a novel, but at least if the novel is done you can get incremental feedback on each chapter and build some continuity with your workshop or faculty advisor. Bear in mind that you’ll be getting feedback at different levels; huge, structural, seismic change suggestions (“I think you should tell it in reverse chronological order!”) alongside minor pedantic sentence-level suggestions (“I didn’t love the word quintessential there”). Be sure to make all the huge seismic changes before the minor sentence-level changes—I’ll talk about that more in next week’s newsletter.
Hey Devon - new reader here working through your stuff.
Just gotta say that you do a great job of articulating the mind of a writer, while incorporating helpful ideas to work through all the challenges. Many others only do 1 of the 2.
Just wanted to pause and send my thanks. Cheers.
I so agree about not workshopping pieces of the novel in an MFA program. Unfortunately, since I was ONLY working on my novel from my second semester on, I had nothing else to workshop (or, at least, it felt that way) and so I grudgingly brought in the first 20 pp. of my novel every workshop for the last four semesters of the program. Not only was it useless, it was actively discouraging. But I felt like I had to use my novel as my workshop piece because that's what I wanted to work on during the semester, and the faculty based their decisions on workshop pieces, etc., etc. Big sigh!