Photo by Nayanika Mukherjee on Unsplash
Every once in a while, when I look at the fiction writing topic on Quora, this pops up:
Good answer, Orson Scott Card. Good answer.
I disagree with many of Mr. Card’s personal life choices — but he’s right about this. If you want to publish your book, you must do as Orson Scott Card says and finish it.
It’s not even a chicken and an egg thing. You cannot publish what you haven’t written.
You can publish what you haven’t edited.
You can publish what you haven’t tried to sell to a traditional publisher.
You can publish long.
You can publish short.
You can publish poetry, blog posts, picture books, and 500,000-word tomes that would make literary agents insta-delete your query letter.
You can publish late — long after you should have just shipped that thing.
You can publish early — before your work is polished well enough to avoid being ripped apart in Amazon reviews.
You can publish pretty much anything.
But you cannot publish it until you’ve finished writing it.
Even if you publish something that’s half written, you have to finish writing the half of it you publish. (Mind blowing, I know.)