My First Novel, or Publication Envy Starts Young

I go around telling people that this accumulation of sentences that I have been working on since the dawn of the millennium is my first novel. But I wrote my real first novel when I was in third grade. It is lost to the sands of time, and I don’t recall the title, but I’m pretty sure it started with The Mystery of… The heroine’s name was Valerie McCartney (I had a thing for Paul) and she had friends to help her solve the mystery, a la Nancy Drew’s Bess and George. The only scene I remember is where one of the characters is trying not to cough, but she can’t help it, so the bad guys find her. I was aware that a cough is generally not that difficult to control and that a sneeze would have worked better, but even then I was cautious about using too many clichés.

The book featured several full-page illustrations, because I liked to draw. In fact, I was primarily an artist. I hadn’t decided if I would draw the pictures on the front of the pattern packages or be a great painter when I grew up, but Art was my calling. I was an avid reader and loved writing sentences using vocabulary words, but writing was just a hobby.

Until my friend Lauren published her first novel, The Case of the Model T Ford. The cover was green, with a picture of the Model T, and inside the text was in a large, purplish font. She got to hand out copies to everyone in both third grade classes. She got a write-up in one of the local newspapers. I think she was even interviewed on TV—her father was a newscaster. Man, was I jealous. I wanted to be a published author, too! So I got a fresh spiral notebook and wrote my first novel. It took about a half a day to write, but even after all that work I didn’t really try to market it.

Because honestly? It was so blatantly “in the vein of” Lauren, who, let’s face it, was a much more polished writer than I. I hadn’t even begun to find my voice—I was just copying hers. My consolation was that Lauren, who also got all-around better grades than I did, couldn’t draw. My first novel sucked, but at least it had illustrations.