About a week ago I was in New York City, wandering around Brooklyn with a writer friend. As we approached a crosswalk, she turned to me conspiratorially and said, “Can I tell you my hot take about writing? You might disagree.”

I said sure.

She said, “I don’t think anyone should be allowed to publish their first book before they turn 30.”

I said I one hundred percent agreed.

I’ve read so many debut novels in the past several years that were artistically and intellectually ambitious, finely written, but somehow flat. In each case I closed the book with the sense that I had just spent time with the work of a plainly skilled author who was anxious to put a first book—any book—out into the world. This anxiety is hard to resist, especially since the publishing industry loves a wunderkind. Who among us hasn’t felt bereft upon learning that Zadie Smith wrote White Teeth while still a student at Cambridge? But the struggle between the overwhelming desire to just be a published author already goddamnit, and the long and slow alchemy of teaching oneself to write well, is one that I think new writers should approach with exceptional caution.

Writing too fast is bad for the obvious reasons—sloppiness, oversimplicity, a tendency to skip subtle but valuable information—but the flaw that I notice the most when I read a publish-me-already-damnit debut is a peculiar sameness of character. I mean this in two ways: main characters whose interiority remains essentially the same throughout the novel, and casts of characters who differ in only slight ways from the main character (and usually from the author). When you’re learning to write, the only model you have for what it feels like to be a person is yourself, so that’s usually who shows up as the main character in all your early work. And if you’re still young (by which I mean in your first three or so decades of life), you haven’t undergone enough change as a person yet to remember what it felt like to be substantively different. It’s tough to conjure up the perspective of someone completely unlike you. It takes many years of life to become someone completely unlike you. If you write and publish too young, you probably haven’t yet developed the ability to imagine characters who are not on some level just iterations of you—and readers are going to notice.

How do new writers solve this problem? I don’t think they (we) can. I think really the only thing to do is to keep living, keep procrastinating, keep putting yourself in new situations, keep interacting with people vastly different from yourself, keep following your instinct to learn down ever more esoteric paths. And, of course, keep writing the whole time. But don’t try to publish any of it until after your 30th birthday.