don't publish your first novel
Just got off the phone with a friend of mine who has been shopping his short stories around and finding the editorial feedback to be... Interesting.
We were talking about "the state of narrative" and how some folks seem to have a very utilitarian (not like that) -- "narratological" was the term my friend used, I think? -- functional approach to narratives. "What does the character want?" becomes the focal point of the narrative, that somehow the actions in the novel need to justify themselves to the reader, because otherwise the reader will... Stop reading?
And I finally said out loud to someone who writes more than I do the terrible truth that I have come to believe:
Never publish the first novel you wrote.
Especially not if its the one you've been working on for the last 10-15 years.
It's not good. It doesn't matter how hard you work it over, or how much polishing you do to it, fundamentally, it is a labor of love and self-indulgence and you will never be able to be objective about it in the ways that will allow you to make a truly excellent novel.
Big talk for someone who doesn't have a novel, I know.
I want to clarify, VERY IMPORTANT, I'm not saying you can never tell the story that the first novel is about. I just believe that you must write the first novel, and then you should hide it in the back of your closet, or ritually burn it on a pyre, or bury it in the backyard or whatever makes sense for you. Then you should write your next 2 or 3 novels--ideally these will not talk 10-15 years to write, instead you can get them done in 1-5 years (depending on your personal situation in regards to: paying employment, childcare, health, familial obligations, etc). Then, at that point in time, you may, if you so choose, re-write the story from that first novel FROM SCRATCH.
I genuinely don't think that it's the ideas that are usually the problem in a first novel. But they're always too personal. Because you've spent so much time working on it and thinking about it, and daydreaming about its future, caring about all its stupid little details, its not possible to keep perspective on the novel/story as a novel/story.
Good art, even the most personal, most intimate works, move beyond the artist. Yes, you should make art for yourself and not to please others. But I think we all need to remember that we also make the art for itself. The thing that you love because its a part of you? That's for you. The thing that you made so you could bring out into the world something that demanded to exist? That's the one that you share with everyone else.