Finishing My Forever-Unfinished Novel
At a reading by a Famous Author, the audience spied him in the distance where he furiously marked up, in red pen, a copy of his Award-Winning book. The moment galvanized hope. Here a Famous Author revised, again, before he read from his already celebrated success. With that red ink, he provided the answer to the oldest question in writing: When am I done?
Never.
I’ve spent fifty years writing. In that half century, I’ve written eleven full novels, countless starts of novels, and fragments of other forms. The truth is I’ve spent five decades working on only one book. This idea took twenty years for me to uncover and then I spent another thirty years trying to find a way to make it work as narrative. My published books—and the ones I’ve kept to myself—have all been attempts to give shape to what is a simple story.
May as well try to catch a quark or lasso a shooting star as try to capture real simplicity.
Four years ago I hit on a workable way to get my idea out of the escape room of my mind, and I began to write my way through it. Only in the last weeks has the most honest way to end the novel become clear. I am almost finished.
What’s true for quarks and shooting stars is true for writers. To learn how far I’ve come, I have to stop. I have to finish.
Does this mean all my other writing goes to waste? Wasted writing is an oxymoron. It does mean my novel took much, much longer than I had planned to winnow its way down to the truest version of my imagined story. The novel alone didn’t eat up all that time, of course. Writing served as only one element in a life that featured families and friends and school and work and illness and the thousands of little storms endured across a lifetime, if not across a page.
Writing is more than “putting words on paper.” Writing is opening one’s mind and heart to an ever-evolving creation trying to find it’s truest form. To get the angel out of the rock, I must remove everything that is not angel, but before I can do that, I must get the rock out of the quarry. It has to be the right rock, the one with the right angel locked inside. That required cutting a lot of rock. Rule of thumb: In all things, hard work before angels.
Aristotle said that no work is finished, only abandoned. Maybe finishing is not a matter of declaring the work complete as much as surrendering to what the novel is at the moment when I don’t so much let the story go as let the story be. What’s true for quarks and shooting stars is true for writers. To learn how far I’ve come, I have to stop. I have to let it be done.
When I consider all the changes this book has pulled out of me—the person I’ve become for writing the novel—it may be more accurate to say that after fifty years, the novel will be—at last—finished with me.
Writing Exercise
Are you writing and rewriting only one story in terms of theme? How does each variation differ in the way those themes evolve? How are you different for having written that evolution? Write a narrative passage in first, second, or third person in which your character comes to understand what they want a story to say. Have your character state the story’s true focus in one word. Bonus Points: State your own project’s focus is one word.
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