How Writing My First Novel Prepared Me To Write My Debut Novel
As of today, August 4th 2020, I am a published novelist. My debut novel, Bronte’s Mistress, is a work of historical fiction about Lydia Robinson, the real older woman who had an affair with Branwell Bronte, the Bronte sisters’ brother. It was released by Atria Books.
Yet every time someone congratulates me on the publication of my “first novel,” I feel a strange twist in my stomach. Because Bronte’s Mistress isn’t my first novel at all.
I’m not counting the childhood “books” I made using crayons and folded printer paper, though they certainly mattered to me a lot at the time. Or my adolescent attempts at novels, though some of those reached a pretty substantial length. (Teenage Finola was plotting an epic fantasy trilogy, a world away from what I write today!) No, I’m talking about the novel I worked on between the ages of 20 and 25, the novel that I was sure was “the one.”
I read plenty of articles telling me it wouldn’t be, of course. But I didn’t, couldn’t, believe the writers of those articles. Writing a book was hard enough, without facing the fact that I might have to do this all over again—without validation, encouragement, or recognition—and maybe again and again after that. So I turned away from the cited statistics about how many great novelists have multiple “trunk novels” (manuscripts that meant the world to them once, but now languish far from the light of day). I told myself that I would be the exception.
I finally started querying literary agents in April 2016. I remember I sent my first email while delayed at an airport, though I’m not sure which one. I received my first reply, a request to send the agent my full manuscript, before my plane even took off. This was it. It was happening. I’d read about the torturous querying process, how writers waited months just to be disappointed by a rejection, or never received a reply at all. And here I was already proving my exceptionalism.
My giddiness was short-lived. Waiting on full manuscript requests, it turns out, is even more soul wrenching than waiting for answers to queries. Over the next six months, I received five full and three partial requests (I just looked back at my trusty spreadsheet to check, although that’s still a little painful). And over the months that followed that, each one of them, along with many other queries, came back as a “no.” There were short noes and expansive noes, form rejections and personalized rejections, detailing the many ways in which I’d failed. The ones that complimented my writing were the emails that made me cry. It was like being hungry and receiving a meal of a few crumbs.
Thankfully, there was one piece of advice I’d heeded, despite my earlier arrogance. While I waited to hear back from agents, I had started writing something new. I began researching the novel that would become Bronte’s Mistress in the Fall of 2016. I started writing a year later and completed a full draft in under six months. My speed was incredible compared to with Novel 1, because I knew what I was doing. Every moment it was hard, I could take a deep breath and tell myself “it felt like this last time.”
By the time I admitted to myself that querying Novel 1 was over, I had another novel almost ready. Yes, acknowledging my beloved first novel was dead still stung, but I just knew to my bones that Novel 2 was better. I prepared myself to face potential heartache again.
The full story of my publication journey with Bronte’s Mistress is a whole article in itself, but I began querying agents in August 2018 and signed with my wonderful agent, Danielle Egan-Miller, within two months. She took the manuscript “on submission” to publishers in late March 2019 and we sold the novel in under five days to Atria Books. And today is the day I’ve been dreaming of since I was old enough to read—I am a published novelist!
Looking back, I wouldn’t change the process that brought me here. Writing my first, unpublished book taught me so many things. Here are just a few:
It taught me what it feels like, physically, emotionally and mentally, to write tens of thousands of words. (At 116,000 words, Novel 1 was longer than Bronte’s Mistress.)
It taught me why outlining is important. (So many times with my first novel I had to stop writing, or go back and fix things, because I hadn’t properly thought through my plotting.)
It taught me how the publishing industry works. (When I started writing Novel 1, I didn’t know what a literary agent was.)
It taught me how to handle rejection, criticism, and silence. (I would NOT have been emotionally equipped to read Goodreads reviews in my early twenties.)
It taught me I was more resilient and self-sufficient than I’d thought. (Throughout the painful process of querying, I confided very little of how I was feeling to even my closest friends and family.)
And, most importantly, it taught me that every novel I write will be better than my last, that writing is a craft that gets better with practice, and that if something I write isn’t good enough, it’s not something I want to release to the world.
People ask me now that I’m published if I’ll ever go back to Novel 1, and I don’t think so. Definitely not in its current form. Besides, I’ve already stolen from it. I transplanted lines of dialogue and a handful of metaphors and similes from my organ donor first novel, so that my debut novel might live. These sentences now feel like inside jokes to me when I reread Bronte’s Mistress, because only I know where they originated.
I’m part of a wonderful group of novelists, the 2020 Debuts, whose debut books are being released this year into this increasingly uncertain world. For some, their first novel is their debut novel. I applaud this achievement, but, for most writers in the group, this is not the case. Still, no matter our individual journeys to get here, or how many novels we have in our bottom drawers, we’re now facing a whole series of “firsts,” together.
I’m delighted that from today the world has a chance to meet Bronte’s Mistress—my debut novel (which also happens to be my second).
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Biography
Finola Austin, also known as the Secret Victorianist on her award-winning blog, is an England-born, Northern Ireland-raised, Brooklyn-based historical novelist and lover of the 19th century. Her first novel, Brontë’s Mistress, about Lydia Robinson, the older woman who had an affair with the Branwell Brontë, will be published in August 2020 and is available for preorder now. By day, she works in digital advertising. Find her online at www.finolaaustin.com.
Social Links
www.facebook.com/FinolaAustinWriter
www.instagram.com/finola_austin
https://www.goodreads.com/finolaaustin
Brontë’s Mistress
“My whole life has been waiting. Waiting to be asked, waiting to be visited. Human beings must have action, or they will make it themselves.”
Yorkshire, 1843: Lydia Robinson—mistress of Thorp Green Hall—has lost her youngest daughter and her mother within the same year. Now, with her teenage daughters rebelling, her hateful mother-in-law breathing down her neck, and her marriage grown cold, Lydia finds herself yearning for something more.
Change comes with the arrival of her son’s tutor, Branwell Brontë, brother of her daughters’ governess, Anne Brontë, and of those other writerly sisters, Charlotte and Emily. Handsome and romantic, a painter and a poet, Branwell is also twenty-five to Lydia’s forty-three. Colorful tales of his sisters’ elaborate playacting and made-up worlds form the backdrop for seduction, and soon Branwell’s intensity and Lydia’s loneliness find a dangerous match in each other.
Meanwhile, Mr. Brontë has his own demons to contend with, and grave consequences for Lydia’s impudence loom. Her prying servants blackmail her for their silence, her husband becomes suspicious as his health declines, and Branwell’s behavior grows increasingly erratic while whispers of the affair reach his bookish sisters.
With this swirling vortex of passion and peril threatening to consume everything she has built, the canny Mrs. Robinson must find the means to save her way of life, and quickly, before clever Charlotte, Emily, and Anne reveal all of her secrets in their deceptively domestic novels.
That is, unless she dares to write her own story first.
Deliciously rendered and captivatingly told, Brontë’s Mistress reimagines the scandalous affair that has divided Brontë enthusiasts for generations and gives voice to the woman vilified by history as the “wicked elder seductress” who allegedly brought down the entire Brontë family.
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