At 12:22 am I wrote the last sentence of my very first book, Heaven’s Hellions. Delirious from working on it for the past four hours, I made many questionable decisions and wrote an ungodly amount of typos. But it’s done.
I wrote my first book and it is over.
Now I want to dissect the experience, tell you what I loved doing and what I hated, ponder my victories and failures, chat about where to go from here.
Stats:
Word count: 51,143
Number of pages: 114
Number of chapters: 27 (not including the prologue)
Started: June 15, 2020
Finished: November 15, 2020
What I thought Heaven’s Hellions was going to be:
It was supposed to be a paranormal mystery. Everett the Believer would be trying to convince Henry the Skeptic that ghosts exist. In the meantime, both boys get haunted. That’s about as far as I got in the original concept.
Then it divulged into something where Christan mythos would come into play (hence the title of the book). Nothing came of that.
However, I do have the sketchbook that contained all the early brainstorming for Heaven’s Hellions.
We would be here all day if I were to go into all of the little changes that were made to the base concept.
What Heaven’s Hellions turned out to be.
Dark. I didn’t know that I the ability to do that, to hurt characters like that, to put them through some of the worst hardships that anyone can endure. I truly reached into the noir depths of my soul — pockets of darkness I didn’t even know I have.
The gist of the novel (I get to call it that!) is after four teenagers mess with an ouija board in the woods, two of them run away into the cover of the night, one gets possessed, and the last has to pick up what’s left. We follow Henry and Everett, the two that didn’t run off, as they try to figure out what happened to the others, Clay and Addison.
Clay’s body shows up. It’s rumored that Everett was the killer. Out of desperation, he tries to find Addison to clear his name.
The reader watches in horror as Everett keeps flinging himself into more dangerous situations in a desperate attempt to alleviate his guilt. He finally brings Addison home, and while the cheers of the search party bounce off the trees, Everett finds out that his best friend and his father went into the woods to search for him. Three weeks pass and they haven’t returned.
Everett snaps like a toothpick. Sure that he can bring home his loved ones, he goes after them and dreams of a happy ending.
He gets captured by a cult.
Unspeakable things happen to him.
In the end, when he’s face to face with the people he tried to save, he kills himself.
10 things this books has taught me:
1: I am not a planner. At all.
I tried my hardest to write an outline. I tried a loose outline, I tried an outline that was very detailed, I tried character cards, I tried scene cards. All of that planning suffocated me. When I sat down to write the thoroughly planned draft, nothing felt right and I hated it.
I loved the mystery of not knowing what was going to happen when I sat down and wrote. I let my characters take my hand and pull me through the story.
There were very few things I knew I wanted to implement from the getgo that actually made it.
2: How to motivate myself to write when I didn’t want to
This is something all writers struggle with at some point. This isn’t to say that I never had writer’s block — I most certainly did — but I had to learn what was me not being motivated and what was me genuinely having problems with my story, and how to deal with each accordingly.
3: How to write a book (wow really? No way.)
I had to adopt this “eh, fuck it” mentality that allowed me to make mistakes, write awful scenes, and some of the worst prose I have ever laid eyes on (I’ll get to that in a second). I had to learn to let go of making this book flow, having it be pretty, hell, having it be readable. I had to constantly remind myself that not only is this the first draft of a book, it’s the first draft of my first book, ever. Just let it be bad. And this is a mentality I adopted fairly early on which is what allowed me to write a book in five months.
4: I’m a character person through and through
I kept writing because I wanted to be with my characters. I wanted to see what they would do next, I wanted to write them interacting and doing things. They are what kept me going when I wanted to quit.
5: Don’t share first drafts
This is the first book I didn’t share the first draft of with my friends, and it’s the first book I’ve completed. Sharing those first drafts puts eyes on the most vulnerable stage of my work, and it placed unnecessary pressure on me to make it flow. Not having people see it gave me the space I needed to make Heaven’s Hellions exist.
6: I need to vent my writing somehow
Shout out to one of my closest friends Emily for having to put up with my constant writing rambles. I would send her monstrous texts talking about something going on with the characters, or scenarios that could happen, or ideas I wanted feedback on. And while she was extremely encouraging, she was never afraid to give tough love.
Thank you, Emily, you mean the world to me and this book wouldn’t exist without your support.
7: My plot bunnies mutate
A plot bunny is another idea for a completely different story. For example, you could be working on a fantasy novel but you get the idea for a contemporary romance instead. Plot bunnies become problems when you start chasing them instead of finishing your current project.
Because I grow so attached to my characters, I can’t stand to let them go. So, when I get a new idea for a seemingly completely different story, I just pick them up and drop them into that narrative. It’s not pretty and it muddies up my mind and my draft.
8: I’m not good at implementing preexisting ideas
When I go for my walks, I get tons of ideas for my stories. In fact, I was planning on having Everett be the son of Satan (among other plot ideas) that never got woven in.
When I sit down to write, I reread what I wrote, then I go from there; I improvise. So all that I had planned gets left out and sulks at the edge of my project.
9: I really enjoy breaking formatting
I love having words float around on a page, make sentences run on, or mash sentences together. Towards the end of the book, I used a lot of filtering to show how my character no longer feels in tune with himself. It’s so much fun to alter the style of the prose to fit in with and extenuate the character’s state of mind.
10: How to make first-person POV work
Does that make me sound conceited? I love first-person POV, but I knew that already. I learned how to make first-person, well, personal. I learned how to keep filtering to a minimum, and when used, make it feel authentic. Now, authentic to Ett or myself has yet to be determined. I wouldn’t say I’m the best at it, but writing 51k words in a certain POV is bound to teach me something.
What I’m good and bad at
That header was a lie; I can’t tell what I’m good and bad at. I’m so close to my work and I have just finished it, I can’t objectively tell what I succeeded and failed at. This isn’t to say that I think I was good at everything I attempted, or that I bombed everything at every turn. I simply don’t know. So, in a few months, I’ll make a more in-depth post about what I did right and wrong in my first novel. Stay tuned.
My favorite parts:
Here are some of my all-time favorite quotes of the book (I feel weird saying that I have favorite quotes in my own damn novel).
For context, this is when Everett and Henry are looking in the woods with a search party for Addison.
“Do you think she’ll be found alive?” Henry asks, his voice barely trumping the whisper of wind in the trees.
“Of course she’ll be found alive.” I say.
“Then why haven’t we been calling her name?”
I also love the last two lines, edgy as they may be. But they’re indicative of the negative character arcs I tried to implement into the novel (let me have my angst):
“I soak in the boy I used to know; I pretend I push up his glasses, and I imagine that he tells a joke.
I laugh as I put the gun to my temple and pull the trigger.”
For much of the book I was torn about whether I should give Ett a negative character arc or not; to keep him as a harmless little lamb or a wolf parading around as a doting sheep. I think I ended up somewhere in the middle.
It was so much fun to write him gaslighting people, lying, convincing himself that he was doing the right thing, among other things. It was exhilarating to write an almost unwittingly manipulative person, to learn about how manipulation works, and to explore the complexities of abuse cycles. I’m not saying I did it well, or that it was effective — I have no clue, but I tried.
I didn’t write any romance and I’m glad I didn’t. Heaven’s Hellions also touched on toxic friendships; Henry and Ett were overly reliant on one another. It wasn’t just that they bickered badly or that they were mean. I wanted to explore codependence and resentment. I wanted to write people that were so afraid to let go that they practically killed themselves and others.
My least favorite parts:
There are so many. My god. I know for a fact this book has tonal and pacing issues. There aren’t enough characters and only two were actually developed. There are plot holes the size of the Grand Canyon. Again, I can’t say what they all are because I’m too close to it right now.
Many of the mistakes I’ve made are the typical novice pitfalls. Either way, when I can, I’ll look back over Heaven’s Hellions and figure out what I can improve upon going forward.
Here are some of the worst lines:
“He chuckles, and I move right along with every movement of his.”
“My limbs are too heavy to lift. They drop to my side as the light now burst in complete darkness.”
I’m sure there are so, so many more, but I don’t feel like mining for them. Trust me, they’re there.
Now what?
I’m not going to edit or revise Heaven’s Hellions any time soon. There is too much that needs to be done, and frankly, I’m tired of working on this book. I’m glad it’s over with. I need to move on to something different, something happier. But that isn’t to say that I won’t ever return to this project. I think that when I’m older, when I have a better grasp on characters, plot and plot structure, and how to write emotionally charged scenes effectively, I’ll give this another shot.
I’m planning on working on a project that’s a fluffy, cute, romance that I will try to push into a further phase of development. This new book is something that I want to revise, I want to edit, I want for people to actually read. Not sure if I’ll publish it or not, but I do know that I want critiques on my long-form work. I want this new project to be something that I’m proud of beyond it just existing.
Because I now know that I don’t like outlining, that I’m reliant on characters and that I may go to the very darkest corners of the universe for conflict, I need to plan for that. I still need to do so much brainstorming for this new book and frankly, I’m not quite ready to jump into another long-form project just yet.
I don’t know if I’m going to keep Everett and Henry and transfer them to a new world (not the romance project). I have the idea for a steampunk paranormal adventure, but I need to do a ton of research for that project. A ton. And it’s sad to say, but this may be the end of the characters I have been with for so long.
I’m going to work on short stories. I’m not burned out, exactly, but I definitely need to recalibrate so I don’t spit out the same thing again. I need to get passionate about my new world and characters, I need to get familiar with them. I want to work on this new website, write different stories, do more beta reading, and try things I haven’t been able to because I was so consumed with Heaven’s Hellions.
Thank yous
Thank you, Heaven’s Hellions, for being my first book. Thank you for all that you’ve taught me. Thank you for your adventures. Thank you for giving me something to latch onto while the world explodes around me. Thank you for giving me a reason to continue through some of my darkest times this year.
Thank you Henry for being the less confusing of the two; for being reliable, sarcastic, and bringing balance. Thank you, Everett for being so loose, for allowing me to project my deepest fears and the darkest parts of my soul onto you. Thank you Clay for being my first fictional dead body, and Addison, my first massive twist.
Thank you Emily for always being there and telling me the shit I needed to hear.
Thank you Google Docs for being available offline.
Thank you spell checkers.
Thank you to all the random authors who give writing advice on YouTube; you’ve taught me so much and provided me with endless entertainment.
And finally, thank you, dear reader, for getting to this point. I hope that you have faith in me, my writing, and my future endeavors.
~Jay
J. V. Montague 