I’ve been writing my first novel for almost two years and I’m almost done. I wrote the first draft by hand from September 2008 to January 2009, then started typing and rewriting in August 2009. I estimate that my book will be around 80,000 words and as I write this I’m over 70,000.
So it’s time for me to start wrapping things up and finish the book.
I should be happy. I spent countless hours and drank about six bathtubfulls of coffee to get where I am. It’s almost done. I can actually see The End just across the street but instead of going up and shaking his hand and buying him a drink, I shutter the windows, disconnect the phone, and hope that he doesn’t notice I’m home.
There is something frightening about being so close to realizing a dream. I have desires to go back into the manuscript and pull plugs and cross wires, yank out whole sections of story and write something different. I basically want to destroy everything—take a sledge hammer to my sculpture and reconstruct a new one from the broken shards.
I fear finishing it because once it’s finished people will have to read it. It’s suddenly out there and people might not like it. People might hate it. People might confirm my worst fears and doubts that: I’m a terrible writer, I wasted my time, I’m a fool, an idiot, and I should never write anything again. In short: I’m a failure and why did I even try to be anything but?
It’s a pattern that I recognize. I’ve seen it many times before. The most memorable was when I ran a marathon and at the 20 mile point (almost 80% done) I was in epic amounts of pain, my legs were screaming at me to stop, to walk, to take a rest, and I was running so slow that a dwarf, a quarter my size, ran past me.
It’s a challenge that everyone faces when they’re doing something difficult. It’s much easier to stop, or start over, or do anything to postpone The End. Which is probably why so many dreams die a quiet death. Writing a story or working on a project is a test because things will inevitably go wrong, the unplanned for will rear it’s dragon head, and that pure and simple idea you had will get buried in a quagmire of details. But it’s necessary. It’s necessary that the writer face the same problems as his story’s hero, and like his character, the writer has to keep going, finish the story, overcome, slay the dragon and win the princess.
While I was running the marathon I kept repeating the same mantra, over and over in my head: I feel no pain. All I do is run. I feel no pain. All I do is run. And after a while my legs started to believe what I was saying. They stopped complaining and just ran.
And I finished the race.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Go for a walk is almost always good advice.
Your post makes me think of the halfway point, and the philosophical puzzle of trying to cross a room by only ever walking half the distance between you and the other wall. If you keep halving the halfway point even the simplest task can become impossible and you fall down the rabbit hole of eternal incompletion.
Seems to me crossing the halfway point is probably a key step in finishing something, but I’m not sure there’s any way of verifying when that’s happened. I imagine it’s a lot like reaching the down half of a mountain – instead of climbing against distraction you start falling towards conclusion. Or something.
But it feels weird when you’re not used to it so it’s hard not to put on the brakes. Enter that voice. What a bullshitter. That laughing scenario seems fairly universal too. I guess that means a lot of us are buying the same lies.
Another danger is working without deadlines in a field where more time can always make it better. That’s a real tricky forest, I find.
Apparently Munch left all his canvases partially unfinished on purpose. Or anyway – that’s what I heard.
Yeah it’s very dangerous spending a lot of time on a project because the more time you spend the less enthusiasm you have for it. I think enthusiasm or inspiration (whatever you want to call it) is at its strongest at the moment when you start the project, maybe even as soon as you have the idea for the project, and then the enthusiasm starts to wilt and die. Sometimes slowly, sometimes very quickly. It’s basically a race. How long can you work on a project before your enthusiasm dies? How long can you keep your enthusiasm going before it fades completely? For big long projects it’s an endurance test.