I've had a dozen novels published and have made far more than a dozen mistakes. Which is why Randy Susan Meyers and I wrote a guidebook to help authors avoid making our mistakes.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
My second, third and fourth novels were mistakes, essentially.
Every book has mistakes in them, every one. There's never been a book published without mistakes.
If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.
I personally made lots of mistakes during my 10-12 years as a newspaper editor. Some of which I felt were big mistakes I have tried to address.
A book's flaws make it less predictable.
I believe you have constructive accidents en route through a novel only because you have mapped a clear way. If you have confidence that you have a clear direction to take, you always have confidence to explore other ways; if they prove to be mere digressions, you'll recognize that and make the necessary revisions.
I'd never written a novel before, and I wrote a novel, and that turned out OK.
One of the biggest mistakes people make is to think that what you need to write a novel is imagination, creativity and a facility with words. Yes, you need all those things, but a novel is a highly complex organism that needs to be dealt with in quite a logical manner.
I do my best to build a strong factual foundation for each of my novels and rely upon my author's notes to keep my conscience clear.
As a reader, I much prefer to read a book where people embody all kinds of ideas and everybody is making mistakes.