Final Doubts

It's always hard for me to bring myself to sit down and read anything I'm writing from start to finish. For one thing, the vision I have of whatever I'm working on is always so much more than what seems to make it onto the page. The story line seems more poignant, the climax seems more critical, the characters more fully fleshed out in my imagination than they often do once I'm actually reading.

The other thing is this hypercritical editor in my head. This editor hates everything, sees sentimentality in places where it should not be, finds cliche after cliche, and repetition in description. This internal editor is pretty damned ruthless, and I always hate to unleash her.

I've been through three full drafts of this novel. I have printed out a clean copy--all 523 pages (oh, the ink cartridges and reams of paper I have gone through). I would really like to be able to read this as a regular reader would, without a correcting pen in my right hand. But I seriously doubt that will be the case.  I have three days all alone--except for Sam cat--to do it, and boy, would it be nice to have a manuscript worth submitting once I get to the end of these three days.

The last two times I have read the pages through, I have marked all over them, and it's taken me five days each time to get from page one to the end. I  know from experience that there comes a time when a writer has to say to herself "ENOUGH! It will never be perfect." I re-read books of mine that have been published and find needling little things I would change if I could. But at this point in the writing process, I am nearing the time when I will tell myself this is the best I can do with this novel, and it will have to sink or swim on its own. (Another lousy cliche to mark out!)

Doubt is a writer's worst enemy. It is not easy to fight through the doubt that comes as a manuscript nears fruition. You wonder if you have moved your main character through enough for honest change. Have you tied up loose threads? What about antagonists? Are there enough? Is it OK to have a situation be the antagonist, as it is in this current book, and actually, in most of my books? And the ending: is it too smarmy? Does it leave the reader satisfied? Do I need to go on a bit longer? Do I need an epilogue? I know what happens to the characters after the book ends, but will my reader? Will they even care? Does any of it matter? Oh, for the love of doubt!

No matter what though, there has been great satisfaction in creating this novel. The characters have become like family to me. The setting and time period of the story are under my skin. There have been moments of total, magical immersion when the least thing outside my "book world" comes as a startling jolt: the doorbell, nightfall, the cat wanting his supper. And I am so lucky to have my little cottage on the coast. It has become my "ivory tower." I walk in and the juices start to flow. Exactly what I had hoped when we found it two years ago.

So after this phase comes what? I don't know yet. I have been out of the writing and publishing scene for so long, almost everyone has retired or forgotten about me. But it would be lovely to have another book to set on the shelf. We shall see if that is in the stars. If it's not, I will still be happy that I managed to finally finish this book.

Onward....

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 …