People don’t usually think of writing as a exhausting work. After all, it’s not like you burn many calories typing on a keyboard or moving a pencil across a page. But yesterday, after a five-hour writing session, my bladder nearly bursting and my fingers ached and my eyes were burnt out from staring at a screen all day. I was physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted. I was so sick of words of any sort that after I was done I stuck to activities where I could think without language, mostly Minecraft and mindlessly sorting Legos. It felt like I’d just finished a long race or an AP test, where I could waste away the rest of the day recovering because I’d already gotten the most important part of the day over with. It was the exact kind of marathon-level exhaustion that I think the end of a novel deserves.
Yesterday was a numb, patriotically colored blur. This morning, though, all the feelings that come with finishing a writing project that I’ve been working on for three months, that I’ve been trying to write for three years, that I’ve been planning for seven years hit me. I’d sort of lived in the novel the past few weeks, when the rush of being near the end pushed my daily writing quota up to 4,000 words a day. I’ve had vivid and terrifying dreams taken straight from the pages I’ve written. I would’ve answered to my protagonist’s name as readily as my own if someone called me by it. During the Confession of Sin at church I accidentally prayed for forgiveness for something one of my characters had done. And now it’s all over. Before, I always thought that writers were being hyperbolic (something we’re pretty good at) when they said that their characters spoke to them, but during this novel I finally felt it. I thought I’d be glad to be done with this novel, but since it’s a stand-alone story (the ending makes no sense if there’s ever a sequel) I feel like I should mourn them.
Which isn’t to say that my story is perfect. Actually, the other half of what’s been plaguing me since finishing it is that there’s so much wrong with it that I can’t help but want to dive back into it and try to sort it all out right away. When I’d been writing I’d had little trouble moving from one scene to the next without looking back, but now that I’ve capped it off, all the problems that I’d been able to put out of my mind are haunting me. Big things, like unrealized character arcs, as much as small things, like my inaccurate representation of central Texan weather patterns in the summer of 2013. At the same time that I’ve been writing this novel in the evenings, I’ve spent my afternoons literally cutting up the draft of a novella I wrote last summer and taping in new sections where needed. It’s my first major editing project, and I’m shocked by how little of the first draft remains and how much I have to rewrite. With the memories of how much time I put into this draft fresh in my mind, it’s hard to think that when it comes time to edit it, most of it will end up deleted and rewritten.
I’m tempted right now to open the document again, delete the last few paragraphs where I closed the last of the loose ends, and get to work again. It seems like it’d be so nice to let the characters keep on living, to get caught up in writing the next scene so I never have to look back on all the mistakes I’ve made. I might actually do that right now, if it weren't for what my main character has been telling me.
This novel is epistolary, meaning the text of the document exists in the world of the novel. It’s the journal of a high school student over the summer, recounting the very eventful last couple months of his junior year. Near the end, which I wrote when my bladder was just about to burst and the cafe employees were giving me dirty looks for going five hours without buying anything, the protagonist writes, “I’m almost done with this story and the chapter of my life that it represents. I’m anxious to get it over with entirely and get on to the work of forgetting. Not to mention this notebook doesn’t have too many pages left.” If there was ever a case of a character speaking directly to the writer, this is it. I had a sort of Dr. Frankenstein moment when I realized that my creation was begging for its own destruction.
The novel might not be finished, and it's not anywhere close to publishable yet, but the story is definitely over. It’s hard, but in the end I think I can accept that.
No comments:
Post a Comment