A Novel Milestone is Met

Late Saturday night, about an hour after midnight, I added two words to the end of the novel I’ve been working on since last October: THE END.

My book (working title: “The Human Library”) is by no means finished. In fact, it’s funny how those lines in the sand we set for ourselves constantly move. For the past several months my goal has been to finish writing the book. Now that I’ve hit that goal, I can see it’s only the first of multiple goals.

A lot of editing remains, and editing, I’ve learned, means many different things. On the most basic level, every single word has to be checked and rechecked — simple your/you’re and their/there/they’re errors aren’t allowed at this level. Then there’s word editing. That’s where I take a sentence like “Joe walked down the hall.” from the rough draft and give it a bit more “pizzazz”. Parts of my rough draft seem almost like a stage production: “she went here, did this, and said that.” As I go through the second draft, everything gets a bit of sheen added.

Then of course there’s logical edits. Last night while reading through my novel I realized that a large portion of my story takes place over one single very long day. My characters are going to be worn out if they don’t get some rest! And finally there’s all kinds of timeline corrections I have to go back and fix. To paraphrase Chekov’s Gun, if you’re going to plant a gun in the first act, it had better go off by the third. Over the past several months I have come to realize that the opposite is just as true. When you get to the third act and a character needs to fire her gun, you had better make a note to yourself to go back to the first act and mention that she owns one (and knows how to use it)!

Finishing the first draft is a big accomplishment, but it’s far from the end of the race.

One thing I didn’t realize before I started this journey was how emotional writing could be. When I wrote the chapter where the evil clone was about to kill the protagonist and his grandfather, my fingers were a blur and still they couldn’t keep up with the action. When one of my main characters died, I quit working on the book for two days until I realized that I was honest-to-good depressed over their passing. It seems silly to admit that, but it’s true. As I worked my way through the story with my characters, I literally experienced some of the same feelings they did. I was elated when they succeeded and heartbroken when they failed. Even thought he characters weren’t real, after a while they became people I knew.

Also, the more I wrote, the less I found I was able to keep explaining to friends and family what was happening in the story. Explaining the early chapters was simple; trying to get someone caught up enough so I could explain what was happening in the 20th chapter became a bit of a chore for both the storyteller and the listener.

Unfortunately there’s no rest for the wicked. On Sunday I started what I refer to as my “second pass” of the novel, where I spit-shine some of those scenes, tighten up the action, and make sure everything flows.

Until I typed THE END I didn’t see a light at the end of the tunnel. Suddenly, the light is mounted to the front of a freight train, and I’m the conductor.