Why I Killed My First Novel

A while back I received my diagnosis. The news came as a terrible shock, and then a sort of relief. Nice to put a name to what was wrong with me. With it. I’d been ignoring the symptoms for months. The metastasising word count. The plot strands that kept growing without ever knitting together. Like real life, I told myself. Where nothing resolves. Episodic, I assured myself. Shaggy dog. Picaresque. Picaresque. Picaresque.

I’d won a prize for this unpublished manuscript, and surely a book deal was just around the corner? But I couldn’t shake the sense that all was not well with my novel. The prize got me an audience with an editor at an eminent indie press. He would tell me what to do.

We chatted for a while on Zoom, his bedside manner impeccable, before his voice grew funereal. He told me I had First Novel Syndrome (FNS). It plagues many debut authors, but not all of them equally. I had all the risk factors. I am (relatively) young, (relatively) straight, male and white. Without knowing it, I had been at risk of contracting this hideous affliction every time I’d sat down at my desk. Put simply (the one thing these writers can’t do), FNS describes a particular kind of first novel that overpromises and underdelivers. Rickety opuses which seek to impress rather than enthral.

A while back I received my diagnosis. The news came as a terrible shock.

‘There’s so much going on,’ the editor said, and he didn’t mean it as a compliment. ‘You should have seen the previous version!’ I replied. But deep down, I knew he was right. It lacked unity. The plots didn’t go together—it was cacophony instead of counterpoint, different stories duking it out. Long story short, my novel, as it was then constituted, involved a precarity spec-fic conceit, a share house kitchen-sink drama, a kinky-sex subplot and an audacious literary heist. There was only one cure, the editor suggested. Find out what my book was really about and discard everything else. But I could tell from his expression that he thought my case was terminal. He was telling me, in not-so-many words, to put it out of its misery.

By that point, I was well into my thirties, and my debut was long overdue. I’d moved to the other side of the world in part to write this book, the most extreme measure in my lifelong project to avoid gainful full-time employment, dependents and impediments, and to put writing—rightly, and, it felt then, increasingly wrongly—at the centre of my life.

In its relentless search for the next big thing, the literary industry has traditionally privileged ‘big-splash debuts’. And yet more and more newcomers are failing to launch. According to a 2024 Esquire article by Kate Dwyer, an ever-winnowing market and the fracturing of traditional media have made it harder for first-time books to find their way into readers’ hands. And just as a successful release can make a writer’s name, an unsuccessful one can tarnish it. ‘A debut sets the bar for each of their subsequent books,’ writes Dwyer. ‘So their debut advance and sales performance can follow them for the rest of their career.’

My first manuscript failed, in part, because I’d internalised the idea of the deus ex machina Big First Novel. Think Sally. Think Zadie. I wanted my career to come from the clouds, fully formed and sui generis, a success that would release me forever from gig work and sluggish sales. I’d seen so many debuts appear and disappear just as quickly, politely reviewed (sometimes even by me), then forgotten—if they were reviewed at all. Instead of thinking of my career as something that could grow and develop over time, I wanted everything, right there and then. Instead of thinking about the story I wanted to tell, I’d tried to write a novel so complex that no one could deny its brilliance.

I wanted my career to come from the clouds, fully formed.

Most books with First Novel Syndrome don’t see the light of day, with a few notable exceptions. David Foster Wallace’s terminally cerebral debut, The Broom of the System, would surely count as one. The novel, which earned him the moniker of a ‘puerile Pynchon, a discount Don DeLillo’, also established his adversarial relationship with editors that lasted his entire career (though the editor of his debut, Gerry Howard, said that Wallace ‘was very polite in ignoring [him]’). The story’s ambition cannot be denied, though its execution most certainly can. These days it’s hard to imagine as knotty a debut being published by a behemoth like Penguin, especially with such a recalcitrant writer. But a few decades ago writers like Wallace were supported to make audacious mistakes that might (or might not) one day lead to something better. Do writers these days get those same chances? For my sake, I hope so.

While my friends in Australia grew up and settled down, I doubled down on this years-long bet on my talent. As my thirties trundled along, and the PhD scholarship that supported my life overseas drew ever nearer to an end, my novel stayed stuck in the mud. I began to suspect I was not going to become the enfant terrible of Australian letters. Rather, I might have made a terrible mistake. If writing didn’t work out, what did I have to fall back on? It was too late to sell out, retrain or do anything else. Biting my nails at my desk in Athens, I was beset by visions of me scuttling back to Melbourne, tail between my legs, bookless and abashed. This book was my last chance to make a good first impression.

I had accepted that my novel was a textbook case of FNS, but how precisely had I let things get so out of hand? Why did I believe my debut had to be complicated, labyrinthine, impressive? Most writers want to make a splash, to varying degrees, especially with their first books. But do debut writers feel this pressure nowadays more acutely than in the past? The cost-of-living crisis is hitting hard, while the publishing industry, much like the climate, seems forever on the verge of tectonic change or outright collapse. Why did I expect to escape a life of artistic precarity?

To get over my bout, I went in search of the heart of my story. Poring over the manuscript, I needed to discover where the heat was. And there was only one place it could have been, hiding there in plain sight. The funnest parts of the novel (to read and write) revolved around a young writer, who stumbles upon Brenda Shales, a cult author from the seventies who has long disappeared from the public eye. In her, he sees the thing he’s long been searching for all along: something to write about. He worms his way into her life and learns the secrets of her brilliant and terrible career. In that version of the manuscript, it was just a few scenes, but they seemed alive in a way the rest of the novel wasn’t.

Why did I believe my debut had to be complicated, labyrinthine, impressive?

The heat was in Brenda—a true artist—and her voice, and in my narrator’s desire, shame and ambition. Everything moved quickly after that. I played them off against each other. I made the tension fucking unbearable. The previous version had begun with a conceit (this conceit), while this time new ideas emerged from the relationship between Brenda and my shit of a narrator (even more hungry for his debut than I was). Instead of a story about everything, my novel had finally become about something. Deception and authenticity. The cost of getting everything you want. I began to see that ambition could be expressed in simplicity rather than complexity, with heart and guts and not merely the head.

I finished the manuscript last year, and in a matter of months, I had a book deal. Now the pressure’s truly on, though it feels different from back then. Instead of obsessing over writing something certain to make a splash, I am resigned to the fact that the success of my book, I Want Everything, is largely out of my control. I’m lucky to have an agent and an editor who have assured me they’re in it for the long haul, not just for this book but all the ones to come. I’m lucky, too, to have written a book I like—and, most importantly, liked writing.

Like my narrator, I want everything: the fame and adulation, the money too. (Please buy my book and attend my events.) But more than anything, I want a sense of fun and fulfilment from the act of writing, something wholly separate from my career. I still recall the feeling of excitement I felt every day, sitting down at my desk to write my way out of the problem I had created, the proof I was finally cured.