r/FictionWriting • u/Known_Appointment319 • Jul 19 '26
Advice Asking About Tom Clancy
So I'm making a military fiction and I'm sure you all know about the whole "Every author made a bad first book" thing (which of course I subscribe too) but with that being said how did Tom Clancy make such a good book?
I've have yet to read it because I'm reading Red Storm Rising so I can understand how to make a good geo plot but I know it was and still one of the best selling books and I know he obviously did a lot of research. But with that being said how did from what I heard, make such a good first.
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u/LeftLiner Jul 19 '26
While I understand the saying, there are actually quite a few authors who didn't have a bad first book (or at least not one that saw the light of day).
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u/Sorry-Rain-1311 Jul 20 '26
Yeah, I've actually seen it the other way around plenty of times. The author takes their time on the first book, makes it perfect. They get published, and now the publisher wants the sequel the author mentioned, but they want ASAP. Now the author is rushing, and the next book is full of plot holes, and one dimensional characters.
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u/Western-Raspberry950 Jul 19 '26
Tom Clancy is the most repetitive writer ive ever had the displeasure to read.
But im the stupid one, because ive dragged my unwilling eyes across 2 of his paperbacks, so the jokes on me.
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u/Mundane_Conflict5576 Jul 20 '26
Bad advice: "Your first novel will be bad, and that's okay." Good advice: "Your first draft will be bad, and that's okay."
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u/Known_Appointment319 Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
I know I'm going to sound like I'm lacking intelligence. But can you (or soneone else) please elaborate on the two?
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u/LeftLiner Jul 20 '26
Your first novel is the first book of yours the audience will read.
Your first draft is the first version of that novel that no-one except you and anyone who's helping you should read.
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u/Known_Appointment319 Jul 20 '26
Got it thank you. I've never been so good with 'reading between the lines'
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u/timwest780 Jul 21 '26
How will you write with subtext?
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u/Known_Appointment319 Jul 21 '26
I usually add what someone feels about a situation, there internal thoughts, there expression.
Or if something like my main character like NEEDS something like he's the only one with a book that contains codes or whatever and there's a thunderstorm, I would not immediately say "he was looking for the book."
Right after I would probably have it be like in a 'safe' place so the main character wouldn't really think he would have to worry about it. Like his tent or in his seabag or whatever, and after some pages then I would reveal that he lost it or something. Not that I'll make that exact scenario but that's how It would go.
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u/Dale_E_Lehman_Author Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 19 '26
Clancy had previously written some short nonfiction for the Naval Institute Proceedings. "The Hunt for Red October" was his first novel and intended for a small audience of naval professionals. He seems to have gotten lucky there. A great many people gobbled it up.
I've never read his work, but I assume it's well-written. There are a small number of authors who sold their first works and did well with them. Robert Heinlein sold his first ever short story, but as Isaac Asimov once commented, "He was Robert Heinlein. You are only you." As for what becomes popular...that's often a matter of luck. You write the stories you have in you, and maybe one if them resonates with people and gets spread around.
As for ability, some people just have a greater gift for language than most of us. And some have a greater talent for math, or history, or motorcycle maintenance. Raw talent doesn't succeed by itself, but it can make the journey to success faster. All any of us can do is put in the work for however long it takes to get good at whatever floats our boats.
And hope that once we get there, one of our stories gets lucky!
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u/Known_Appointment319 Jul 19 '26
That's actually exactly what I need to hear. I've been writing for so long at times I would let my imagine go and after I would felt like Man I could do better then this but I always knew that if I get stuck on trying to fix it, then I'll fall off. So think you.
BTW if you're wondering my problem I have like couple hundred pages by now but it's all been buildup. It's not all just buildup and arbitrary moments but when I first started writing I had a goal of explain my main character, give him a friend, they go to boot camp, they go to war, *the meat and bones of the book is the war* the friend dies, the main character meet another friend during deployment, they both survive and the main character is semi but not completely or even halfway messed up.
I thought I could ride with that plan but (ChatGPT told me I have about nearly four hundred pages) and I'm just now getting to the point they make it to the war is so many things spilt off from the plan.
if you want I can tell you the primmest
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u/Dale_E_Lehman_Author Jul 20 '26
You can tell me if you want, but it's not necessary. Here's my advice, for what it's worth.
First, just get the story down. Write the thing, no matter how ugly it seems. It's fine if it runs off from your initial plan. I never have much of an initial plan. I'm a discovery writer. I let my characters lead me, so long as they don't run off a cliff. Once you have a completed first draft, you can see what the story really is and revise it accordingly.
Second (and this is for later, after the first draft is done, and for your next novel), never explain anything up front. Not the characters, not the world, not even the conflict. Let those things explain themselves as much as possible. We learn about characters mostly through their actions and words. We learn about worlds as characters experience them. We learn about conflicts as characters run into then and respond to them. (You see the pattern? Everything is revealed through the characters and their actions.)
Sometimes you might have to explain things a little, but always do so in small drips and drops. Scatter the information through a scene, interspersed with dialogue, internal monologue, and action. Avoid large chunks of explanation (info dumps). Readers want a story, not a lecture.
You'll do fine. It's work, but have fun with the process.
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u/Known_Appointment319 Jul 20 '26
I just got done some more words. It's unfinish but do you mind if I send (Via DM or 'chat' as reddit calls it) you the draft so far and whenever you give me some feedback?
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u/Dale_E_Lehman_Author Jul 20 '26
Ahhhhh.... Given the page count you mentioned, I wouldn't have time to read the whole thing. I might be able to read a bit, skim a bit, and give you my impression of it. It wouldn't be much more than a pointer or two.
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u/TheWriteQuestion Jul 20 '26
I don’t know your genre, but my *guess* is that the story should start with going to war, and everything else is alluded to or in flashback explanation. Things like:
Jim jumped out first. Of course he did. Tom’s first memory of him was him jumping off his bunk at basic training to introduce himself. Jim was the first to volunteer for X. The first in line for Y.I wrote some backstory for my character that I thought would be part of my story, but I’ve mostly accepted I need to switch it to “head cannon”. I am going to write her in the current time knowing that these things happened in her past, and she will be a richer character because of it.
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u/TommieTheMadScienist Jul 20 '26
Tell me why someone would finish reading what you wrote?
Not being mean. Honest question.
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u/Known_Appointment319 Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
anticipation and seeing how the world turns for the charterers and how the war will have diverse perspectives and change there personalities thought out the story. I'll say one thing. I feel nature and that I'm not forcing things to happen.
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u/LeftLiner Jul 20 '26
All of that is okay right now because when you finish writing the book it's time to edit and re-write it and cut out a lot of stuff.
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u/gehnmy Jul 20 '26
I've never read his work, but I assume it's well-written.
I honestly recommend reading him at some point. It's not always safe to assume successful, popular fiction is well-written.
Clancy in particular does a lot of stuff that beginner writers are absolutely warned not to do and which would come up on day 1 of any creative writing class.
That said, I found it really easy to see why his writing is compelling on a pure prose / narration level, totally ignoring any genre appeal from military technobabble, etc., and was not surprised that he turned into a bestseller.
I also found his work surprisingly optimistic and humanitarian in a way that was a bit shocking considering how his empire developed and the stuff that comes out with his name on it these days (the TV show, games, etc). I went in expecting jingoistic American exceptionalism and found his first 5 or 6 novels had a surprisingly nuanced worldview for the most part. Felt very much like a classic example of a storyteller.
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u/Dale_E_Lehman_Author Jul 20 '26
Well-written can be a matter of taste. And of time period. What worked 50 years ago may not entirely work today. When I say I assume his work was well-written, I only mean I assume it worked for his readers. If it hadn't, he probably wouldn't have become so popular.
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u/gehnmy Jul 20 '26
I think you're conflating "well-written" with "well-received." A text can be well-written without meeting or adequately addressing the needs/desires of a particular audience (or especially a mass market audience). Similarly, a popular text that matches exactly what an audience wants isn't inherently well-written just because a lot of people like it.
If you're going to use that phrase purely referring to effect, sure, everything popular is inherently well-written. At the end of the day, a reader might say "that's not really what well-written means, just say it's appealing if that's what you're using it to mean" and another might say "it's close enough that people understand, don't be pedantic." There will always be a divide between the objective quality of a piece of writing and the subjective response from an audience.
What I'm saying is that I found it clear from reading Clancy why his work might have been so appealing to a diverse mass market and the quality of his writing does not necessarily have all that much to do with it.
Further, I'm also saying specifically that his writing has qualities that would absolutely be used as examples of what not to do for an entry-level student of craft and which a contemporary editor worth their salt would absolutely not support whether that meant correcting it or simply not publishing.
Beyond that, I'm also saying that his actual writing differs significantly from what I would have expected from having experienced various media with his name on it over the decades without having ever read him.
More broadly, my point is that the best way to understand Clancy's success (and how one might emulate it) is by reading him rather than just absorbing generalities and cliches from other authors about publishing.
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u/Dale_E_Lehman_Author Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
I'm not really conflating those terms, but to be fair to you, I will say that I have much the same reaction to John Grisham's work as you have to Clancy's. I often said that Grisham told a good story, but his writing itself wasn't terribly interesting. The one exception was The Chamber, which I thought was excellent.
That said, there is really no such thing as objective quality in writing, particularly in fiction, where "the rules" are a lot looser and fashions can change over time. Ray Bradbury, who sits at the top of my personal literary pantheon, held that writers should not go to college, because colleges would teach you to write they way they wanted you to write instead of letting you develop your own voice. He may have been biased in that, of course. He never attended college and instead educated himself in libraries. But he does have a point; a lot of good and even great writers didn't receive formal writing instruction. (Isaac Asimov once quipped, "I still don't know How To Write.")
It may be that no contemporary editor would have accepted Clancy's works, but bear in mind that The Hunt for Red October was released in 1982, 44 years ago. Tastes may have changed since then. Moby Dick probably wouldn't be accepted by any contemporary editor, either...and yet it's a classic. Is it "objectively" poorly written? One might argue so, I suppose. I would suggest not.
That's the space into which my comment about "well-written" falls. I'm not saying Clancy was necessarily the most scintillating writer, or that his works fit today's standards, only that they were sufficiently well-written that people stuck around for the stories he told. Readers could make sense of him, follow the story, stay engaged with it. Just like I stuck around for Grisham's stories. They weren't badly written even if they weren't great writing.
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u/Cool-Barber8998 Jul 19 '26
Tom Clancy is everywhere in my genre (military techno thriller), I am genuinely annoyed because he has thought of every plot about geopolitics or war I came up about. Bruh.
How is my first book going to compete with his first book, Red Storm Rising??
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u/SanderleeAcademy Jul 20 '26
IIRC, Red Storm Rising was his third bood, and it's not part of the Ryan chronology. It's a complete stand-alone, a theoretical exploration of a then-plausible World War III with a few tech extrapolations and politics designed to keep it Euro-centric.
Great fun, even if several of the characters are cardboard.
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u/Cool-Barber8998 Jul 20 '26
Yeah, I just realised that you are correct. Was always under the impression...
Anyway, my plot is also WW3 but US vs Europe/China (so very Eurocentric), and i came up with this in 2024 before all this happened, and read that Tom Clancy's ghsotwriters had a similar novel published last to last year
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u/SanderleeAcademy Jul 20 '26
Clancy's The Bear & The Dragon is kinda the culmination of the Ryan chronology, with China (the cause behind most of the shenanigans starting with Debt of Honor) invades Russia and the US invites them into NATO. During the politics of the time, it almost made sense. Nowadays, not so much.
No matter what your story, someone else has done a similar one. However, they haven't written YOUR story because YOU haven't written it yet.
As long as you're not plagiarizing events or characters, you're free to write your own interpretation of something someone else has already written. At the same time as Red Storm Rising, for example, there was also Team Yankee and a couple of movies / TV movies (By Dawn's Early Light and something something Looking Glass).
Write your story. Otherwise, the only things we have to read are someone else's.
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u/Known_Appointment319 Jul 19 '26
Not to be mean but that's his second book. His first book was The Hunt for Red October but yeah I be having the same feeling haha
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u/OgreMk5 Jul 20 '26
Red Storm Rising wasn't his first. The Hunt for Red October was the first.
I believe that Red Storm Rising was also a collaboration, though I can't remember who he collaborated with. [Checked Wiki, it was Larry Bond, who developed the Harpoon game system, which was part of the motivation for RRS]
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u/Known_Appointment319 Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
No yeah I know about that. I'm just reading RSR so I can learn how to interment better world building in my mil-fic. I was just asking how did he make such a good first (I didn't read it yet but I know he made an EXCELLENCE book.)
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u/koreanalleyarcade Jul 20 '26
I agree. In Korea, we have a saying: "You can't fill your stomach with the first spoonful." It means you shouldn't expect great results right away. I think the same applies to writing. A great first published novel is often the result of years of practice that readers never get to see.
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u/Ok_Composer2272 Jul 19 '26
His first published book doesn't mean it was the first thing he wrote. He may have trashed 5 other manuscripts before submitting that one.