Spoiler alert: This review contains spoilers for the film The Lesson

A friend — another writer, because we masochists have to stick together — tells me she’s not worried about her novel. This is a different tune than she’d been singing all year as she works on this mammoth project that every writer dreads, yet flirts with: writing her first book.

What’s changed? I ask. Turns out — she tells me — all the writers she’s researched say the same thing: you’re doomed to write a bad book in your twenties, then either bury it and never look at it again or completely rewrite it years later. But the bad first novel is crucial. It means you’ve had the discipline face the screen for months, even years. It means you’ve written a book. But a bad first novel removes the agony of showing it to anyone.

Of course, there are exceptions. But for most writers, the first book won’t be a masterpiece. It’s a jumping-off point — a dock at the edge of a pond.