How To Write Your First Novel

What My Twenties Taught Me About Storytelling, Power, and the People We Become

After about 78 revisions of my novel THE LILAC ROOM over the past year, I’m back in the querying trenches with a revised manuscript and a brand new pitch, which means that, with a bit of luck, the novel will be on track for publication in the next several years. As many writers may know, an author’s most difficult task lies not necessarily in the composition of the novel itself but in the act of staying sane during this grueling submission process—whether in securing a literary agent or an editor at a major (or minor) publishing house.

Yet for those of you in the budding stages of novel-writing, it might seem that writing the novel itself is the hard part—and, indeed, I do not deny that writing a novel is no easy feat. And if you have developed the stomach for grappling with hundreds of thousands of words of prose, you are likely already equipped to play the soul-crushing “waiting game.”

But we are getting too far ahead of ourselves. For those of you who are still in the writing or even developmental stages of publishing a novel, the submission process is so far off that it is pointless to muse on such a hypothetical future. Therefore, today we shall explore how to write a novel in the first place.

Writing a novel is such a personal endeavor that I regret I cannot provide you with a set of prescriptions that will guarantee novelistic success. Some novels were born out of a ghost story contest (Frankenstein), others from one man’s experience at sea (Moby Dick). So while there is no one-size-fits-all approach, what most novels share in common is their author’s openness to experience. Yes—writing a novel requires living.

The best advice I can give, then, is to go out and experience the world.

It is no secret that writers tend to be introverted (good luck convincing an extrovert that spending four hours alone with a blank page is more exciting than a night out at a rave). But the introverted writer who ultimately succeeds once put himself out there—sometimes against his will—and learned how to translate experiences into words. Indeed, great writing is born out of experience.

So the best advice I can give you in writing your debut novel might seem counterintuitive: don’t spend your days writing—instead, live life, explore the world, shuffle back to your desk in the early hours of the morning, and then write.

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Writing THE LILAC ROOM went something like this and was inspired by a host of personages I encountered in my carousals around New York City in my early to mid-twenties. The premise of the novel is two-fold: on the one hand, you have an underlying thriller-type plot in the background that follows the suicide of a young woman named Rebecca Solomon; on the other, you have the romantic entanglement of my main character Cassandra—or Cassie, if you will—with a spurious FBI agent named Adam. These two plot lines increasingly converge as the novel progresses, and both underscore its social commentary on New York City’s elite class, as well as Cassie’s obsession with finding herself among the ranks of these “elitist, mathematically-driven circles,” as she aptly describes them. Each of these plotlines was inspired by events in my own life.

I was never as obsessed as Cassie with joining these nebulous Manhattan social circles, but I became aware of their existence on the subway one day several years ago when two of my friends (whom I had introduced to each other) were discussing a party they attended that had been featured in The New York Times. I was livid about their conversation for about a week and could not understand how I had also not been invited, yet the more I read about this party, the more I realized just how decadent and morally questionable these sorts of events were, and I had the idea to write a story where a similar party would lead a girl to suicide. Thus THE LILAC ROOM was born.

The novel’s romance plot was inspired not by my own life but by that of a former friend: she had a guy chasing after her whom she chronically deemed “beneath her,” and I started to think about the sorts of ridiculous standards that we set on people when it comes to choosing life partners. My friend insisted that the guy had “no class” (this later became one of the novel’s most telling lines) and that no one in polite society would ever date him. I got to thinking about this idea of “polite society” and came up with the idea of Adam, an uncouth outsider from deep in Brooklyn who has no idea how to behave around Manhattan socialites. Adam is the catalyst for Cassie’s own transformation as she realizes that “high society” isn’t everything—and falls in love with someone she might deem a “simpleton.”

Adam is named, of course, after the world’s first man: in a world filled with sharp, ambitious, and often morally ambiguous characters, Adam is refreshingly innocent and unworldly, straightforward and sincere. As he loses his innocence, he gradually becomes the only person in Cassie’s world who operates under a distinct moral compass—and experiences shame for his actions in a world where most people act ruthlessly and feel no remorse. In a way, Adam is a direct reflection of his namesake in Genesis and is the last vestige of virtue in a world that has abandoned propriety and moral order.

At its core, THE LILAC ROOM is a meditation on ambition, morality, and power. As Cassie navigates the intoxicating world of affluence and privilege that she wishes so desperately to belong to, she confronts a host of players who mask their dehumanizing mentalities under the pretense of “doing good” and must decide whether belonging to such a sphere is truly worthwhile—and, indeed, morally sound.

I’m excited to bring THE LILAC ROOM to you in the near future. If you are excited to read it sooner, please send a carrier pigeon to your friendly neighborhood literary agent (agents, it seems do not read emails) letting them know that you will not stand another minute without this novel in the universe.

In the meantime, I’ll keep writing—and hope to bring my next novel to you soon!

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