Leslie Pietrzyk is the author of two novels, Pears on a Willow Tree and A Year and a Day. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in many journals, including The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, Shenandoah, The Sun, and The Washington Post Magazine. She teaches in the graduate writing program at Johns Hopkins University and in the low-residency MFA program at Converse College. She is the editor of Redux, an internet literary journal that features previously published work not available elsewhere online, and she blogs regularly at Work-in-Progress.It all depends on what one means by the word "first." My first official novel is Pears on a Willow Tree, published by Avon Books. It started as a short story--not a novel--and it wasn't a novel for a long time but a family of mothers and daughters about whom I kept having questions I needed answered. The way to answer those questions was to write another story about them. Eventually, I saw that I had a novel. At about this point, an agent read one of the chapters in a literary journal and called me: Did I have a novel I could send her? Yes, it so happened that I did. After some revising, she sold the book in the first batch of submissions to editors. Yay!
That sounds easy, doesn't it?
But there had been an earlier first novel that I had written: a full 300-page manuscript. After much querying, I found a great agent for that book, and she sent it out to everyone and then some. In exchange, I received a lot of nice rejection letters from editors. That book was never published, and probably rightfully so.
So I wrote another first novel, another 300 pages. While there are aspects of this novel that I still like, it had some major flaws, and though I queried a couple of agents, no one was interested. I knew the book wasn't right, and I wasn't interested in those characters anymore, so I gave up quickly (considering I'd just spent three years writing the book).
So I wrote my third first novel. This novel brought together everything I had learned from writing the first two books. I got dozens of very nice rejection letters from agents, but no one agreed to represent it and there was no clear consensus on what was "wrong" with the book. If I were ever to undertake the major revision that would be needed for one of these early novels, this is the one I would choose to revise. (Not that I plan to, but if.)
And then I wrote Pears on a Willow Tree--maybe twelve years after that first first novel. I suppose it would have been nice to come up with Pears on a Willow Tree right from the start, and to save all that time and energy and paper. Of course, doing it that way would have been impossible. I had to learn how to write a first novel before I could publish one.
Then I had to learn how to write a second novel, but that's another story.
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