But what if my novel isn't...good?

panic at the disco (when sending 65k words to your agent)

A few weeks ago, I finished the first draft of my novel. I kept staring at my laptop screen, cursor blinking, waiting for some kind of sign. Relief? Pride? A burst of confidence?

Mostly, I felt like I’d thrown a very large, very vulnerable message in a bottle into the sea and was watching the tide go out. What if it’s not good?

Not bad, necessarily - just...not good.

The email I sent to my agent didn’t exactly say ‘Hi, hope you don’t hate it!’ but it wasn’t far off.

Me, just after I sent the email. Manifesting (and reading my horoscope).

This is the part where I cringe at what I’m about to write (you have my permission to roll your eyes here), but I’ve never had this problem before. When I wrote my memoir I knew instinctively that it was good. I spent very little time editing or worrying about its place in the world.

I was offered representation pretty quickly and at no point did I have an existential crisis about what I’d created. Sometimes, even now, I have a quick skim through the final draft and, in another eye rolling moment for you, end up laughing at my own jokes.

Fast forward to fiction. And a novel which I cannot assess, one way or the other.

What is going on?

Outside of writing, I’m an Associate Professor of Law and PhD supervisor. It is literally my job to look at documents all day and provide feedback. Before my academic career, I was a corporate lawyer, with - yep, you guessed it - a specialism in contract analysis and drafting. It’s been a while since I got my hands on a juicy 300 page IT contract, but I know I’d still be able to spot a contradictory clause or a misplaced term within seconds, such is my training.

I have wondered if the fictional element is the issue. Maybe when something has come from the depths of my imagination, rather than from my own life, that’s where things start to get muddy. I am plagued with questions that, as an obsessive listener of writing podcasts, I know I should have the answer to. What sort of genre am I writing in? What kind of an author am I? Who will pick this book off a shelf? I didn’t have any of these dilemmas with the memoir.

What next then? Here’s my plan for getting through this time of doubt:

• Obviously the first thing I did was consult my horoscope. For that is indeed where ALL the answers lie. It also winds my husband up. Fortuitously, Scorpios have much to look forward too. One forecast even said I’d be getting a big deal TO DO WITH WRITING on 4th July. Phew.

• I have started another novel. I learned this trick from

  Penny Wincer
  . She was talking in her fabulous membership The Fold (of which I am an OG member) about the day her agent asked what she would do if her novel didn’t sell. Penny answered, ‘I’ll write another one’. To be fair, when I first heard Penny tell this story, I laughed in my husband’s face and said that if that happened to me I’d give it all up and never write again. But I’ve got over that idea now. Penny’s seems far more sensible.

• I am walking it out, whilst listening to more writing podcasts. Right now, I’m particularly taken by The Honest Authors’ Podcast with Gillian McAllister and Holly Seddon. I’ve hoovered up all the episodes where they talk about rejected queries, books not selling, or selling quietly and not to the fanfare we often hear about in the trade press. This has helped.

• If it turns out that this book is not good, I’ll still be proud that I wrote a novel. This time three years ago, I wasn’t writing anything at all. A 65k novel? Completed it, mate.