Dear Seventeen Year Old Jess...

Or, what it feels like to finish a first draft of a novel...

you’re also about to graduate high school yay!!

Dear Seventeen Year Old Jess,

You just failed in your first attempt at NaNoWriMo.

You’ve got this book growing in your head as a senior in high school, which is great. Fantastic honestly. The ideas have been bouncing around for about two years now, and, wow, there’s this challenge out there to try to write a book in a month. Even though you’re applying to college too and obsessed enough with Doctor Who right now to throw a party for the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special, you went for it, and that’s amazing.

You made it about two weeks pretty consistently, but then the slowing momentum (and possibly the holidays, college applications, and again, Doctor Who) got to you. You realized you weren’t going to get to the 50k, and you stopped.

You failed.

You don’t have a book in front of you right now.

Honestly, it’s still a long way away. You failed last month, and you’re going to fail many more times before you hold a book in your hands. You’re going to plow through several more NaNoWriMos without even breaking 25k, and even once you do finish your first NaNoWriMo, it’s still going to take more than that.

But you will.

I have a book.

I finished the first draft of it three days ago, on December 12, 2023… or technically it was December 13 because it was past 2 am when I typed “end. part one.”

But never mind that.

The first twenty five chapters of it are sitting printed in a binder right now on the coffee table to my right, and I’ll be printing the rest of it next time I have access to a printer because this book is big and I couldn’t print it all at once.

I did it!

At long last, I did it.

There are few things you should know.

Your three books have become five, and there’ll probably be some standalones too. Characters you haven’t even met yet are going to completely take over the story, and man can I not wait for you to meet one of them in a little over a year. Your writing is going to take off once you abandon third person — but never give up past tense when writing novels, please. You’ll need to learn to outline, though that probably doesn’t surprise you. And you’ll need to abandon your desire for perfection even more — as we all certainly need to.

It’s okay to write poorly, because that’s how you learn how to write well. The blank page is scary, the one with words is fun. You actually like revising better anyway. So think deeply now, take notes with abandon, and just unblank the page. You’ll be grateful for your notes, your doodles, and your half-baked drafts and bits of dialogue later. I’ve resurrected your work several times to solve problems and sometimes I wish you had written down more.

You’ll learn the craft though. That simply takes time.

The real reason you didn’t finish this year though is that you weren’t ready. You might not feel it right now, but looking back, it’s quite clear. You’re seventeen. You’re still a child. What this book is now is a bit too big for you. You have a sense of this. You look at people like Tolkien and know that their works were written later in life, and you admired the maturity and life experience that undoubtedly went into their stories. And so… amazingly, you don’t feel a need to rush right now.

I kind of admire that about you.

It’s actually something that I’ve been struggling with recently. I want to write sooner, more quickly, get my book out there, and be an author.

But you’re right, and as I’ve been hurriedly writing the past few months, truly enjoying it and losing myself in the story (I’ve written about one hundred thousand words since November 1, can you believe it?), I’ve started to think that way again.

This story is too precious to rush, and it will be written best from a life well lived.

When I look back between where you were with the story in 2013 and where I am now in 2023, I see that, yes, there are a lot of lessons I’ve learned in terms of craft and time management and style and how to construct a narrative. That technical stuff all matters, it helps a lot. But the biggest things, the things that make up the actual heart of the story as it currently stands… they simply come from life you have yet to live.

Things you’ve yet to do, people you’ve yet to meet, classes you’ve yet to take, books you’ve yet to read (trust me, this book would not exist as it does without Russian literature and anime, hilarious though it is to mention those two things in conjunction with each other — especially since you’re not into them yet, but you will be soon, buckle up), places you’ve yet to go, failures you’ve yet to experience, trials you’ve yet to bear, prayers you’ve yet to bring to God.

This book is the sum total of those things.

And as I look ahead at the next couple of books that will make up this story, part of me wants them done soon too so I can put them out into the world… but I know well that there are many other years of life I have yet to live that I will live alongside the writing of those books. Only doing that will make them all they can be.

And I want to rush neither the writing nor the living as I do.

Of course, this will always be the case, and in some ways, I could take this line of thought into absurdity and just never finish. I won’t do that. I’ve got a better idea of how much time I need to write things than I used to, which helps me make much better use of my time. I’m going to finish it, unless, God forbid, I die first.

But thank you for being able to willing to work slowly.

It’s a good reminder to me now.

And thank you for failing. Thank you for being okay with failing. Thank you for trying again in spite of failing.

And I want to offer you encouragement in the life you are about to live that is going to create this book. It is actually going to get harder than you currently expect it to be. Better for sure, happier in many periods, but overall more difficult. You are going to start to see the world with complexity you are only just starting to see. You're going to ask questions that hurt. You’re going to feel alone. And you’re going to — with the help of prayer and people, not purely your own willpower — make it through.

All these things only make it more worth it once you’re done.

Believe me, they do.

So many wonderful things lie ahead for you, more than you even know, and you’re going to take those things and turn them into a book you’re pretty proud of by first draft standards.

I’m four chapters into my read-through right now, and while it’s not perfect, it’s not half bad either. It’ll get there.

So yeah… that’s what it feels like to finish the first draft of a novel.

You’re satisfied. You’re thrilled. You’re a little confused as to how you got here. You’re super nostalgic. You’re very happy you finally finished your year having succeeded for the first time at the New Year’s Resolution you’ve made every year for the past decade.

So yeah. I don’t know if there’s anyone out there who would be happier to hear this than you. Figured I’d let you know.

Courage, dear heart. You’ll get there. Keep writing.

Sincerely, still barely believing that it’s happened,

Twenty-Seven Year Old Jess

December 15, 2023

That’s a wrap for the year, my friends. I’ll be taking the rest of the year off for Christmas. See you in 2024 with more fun things to come! Go do something that would make your seventeen year old self proud. God bless :)