THE END -- But Not Really

Two weeks ago, I typed THE END. It was a big deal for me, because I started the current novel seventeen years ago. During that time, more often than not, I believed in my heart I would never finish it, never write fiction again. Since beginning this book, there has been mayhem in the world and personal upheaval, death (a lot of death), divorce, rebuilding, love, loss, sickness, and just a whole lot of living. In other words, one thing and another seemed to take me farther and farther away from the thing I love to do, that I believe I was meant to do, and I just did not think I could ever reconnect with it. But life has finally calmed down again, and I have finally forgiven the publishing industry for not living up to my expectations, a resentment I didn’t even realize I harbored until it was brought to my attention. So when I left my job with the county last fall, I was determined to get back to this book. I told myself that if I never wrote another thing, I wanted to finish it.

About half of it was written. I mistakenly believed I had much more than half, but I had never gone all the way to the end of it, so there was really no way to know exactly what I did have. Along the way, a few people had read some of it – the beginning mainly, which was unexpectedly polished, although it shouldn’t have been unexpected. I had started over – and started over -- time and again, written to a particular point, stopped, gone back to the beginning, started over yet again. When something gets rewritten that many times, it gets polished. I just never could get the story arc straight in my head, or even what it was really going to be about. I had a main character and I had a time period, and that was about it. So when I would get to the hard part, the pivot, I would get stuck. Two weeks ago, when I typed the words THE END, it was like WOW! I had finally worked passed that pivotal middle, put my nose to it, and bulled through to an ending. And it felt … well, it felt just fantastic. I told exactly two people. I wanted to keep it to myself because I knew it wasn’t a real milestone. But it was, at least, the start of one.

Having been down this road a few times before, I know it’s not finished. But it’s huge to get a first draft – a whole, big, start-to-finish first draft. This book is not a thing of beauty yet but I’m hopeful. Like I always told my classes back when I taught workshops – you’ve got to give yourself permission to write badly just to get that first draft DONE. The real writing comes in the rewriting. But first I needed to let it rest, to put it away for a short while, to think about it as a whole, before I even reread it in its entirety for the first time. I have given myself two weeks. Any more than that, I feared might become a month, then two months, then three, and before you knew it, I could be back to procrastination inertia. It’s certainly easier to THINK about a book than it is to actually write one.

So later this morning I’m driving down to the bay house, by myself, to read the thing. To see if it holds together. And if it doesn’t, to see what needs to be done to get it so it does. There’s no internet there. There’s barely television. But there’s a kitchen table, and a dreamy view out the window at Carancahua Bay, at the sunsets, the diving pelicans, all those calming things that I hope will allow me to shut out the noise and hear the voices in the book. I’m so excited that I'm up before dawn, anticipating my own personal writer’s retreat. I hope to come back full of the momentum it will take to wrestle this thing into a real novel.
Onward …