So, I’m writing a military-thriller fiction novel, but I find myself rather reluctant to publish it.
Why? Because I’m sure that, no matter how good the military-thriller novel may seem right now - and I think it is a good story, if I do say so myself - that I’ll probably look back on it 20 or 30 years from now and think, “Wow, that was a dumb story idea,” or “I can’t believe I wrote something so unrealistic,” etc.
But I can’t sit on my book forever and not publish it, either. So…have any of you ever dealt with this issue - namely, publishing a work of fiction (or a music album, or nonfiction book, or whatever) - but then later on, years down the road, regretting it, thinking that it was dumb or poorly-written?
Publish it. I know plenty of writers who cringe when they look at their earlier work. The point, though, was that it was the best you could do at the time, and there’s nothing embarrassing about being published.
Look, every single thing you write about today’s world will look slightly off in 20 years. Twenty years ago we didn’t have cellphones or social media. Every description of every everyday activity now looks odd. You can’t avoid that in fiction. You basic word choice will be a bit odd as the language evolves. And yet we do read fiction from 20 years ago, and 50, and 150.
Then why on earth did you even bother to write it? Publish it. You could be run over by a bus next week and die forgotten by the world. At least this way they can point and laugh for all eternity.
Set it in the present but throw in the occasional off-kilter pop culture reference like how Jack Lord played Captain Kirk or how Spiro Agnew lost to Jimmy Carter in 1976, i.e. the story is set in a parallel universe so deviations from the real world are to be expected.