I will always love the opening scene from the otherwise-eminently forgettable movie Romancing the Stone. The protagonist, a romance writer, is finishing her new novel, pulls the last page off the typewriter, talks to her cat, and gets thoroughly drunk.
Of course, in real life it doesn’t work that way. Nowadays we don’t generally use typewriters anymore (and thank God for that); and that first “the end”? Um, no. It’s followed by a surge of dopamine… and many more months of seemingly endless drafts. There’s a continuum that starts with that first exclamation of “I’m done!” and ends with publication, and most of us are at any given time on some point on that continuum.
I just finished the fifth version of “I’m done” with a novel called The Cambridge Effect, the second novel (after The Everest Enigma) in my Abbie Bradford International mystery series, and a bit of the bloom is off the rose by now. To be frank, I’m sick of it. Version Four was sheer hell. I wrote, “I hate this book” on a little sign in my workspace. I cursed, I paced, I came close to tears.
For me, that’s a pretty normal experience.
But then Version Five came along. You can figure this out, I told myself… and I did. Plot holes offered me ways out: a ladder, a secret passage, an ability to teleport, some way out of the hole I’d dug for myself. Characters I thought I detested showed themselves to be occasionally endearing.
I gave it a little time to settle, read it through again, made some tweaks, and two days ago, I mentally wrote “the end” (we don’t actually write it anymore), ran a final spellcheck, and sent it off to my beta readers. It will come back from them ready for Version Six, and then go to a developmental editor (yep: Version Seven), and then finally be copyedited (Version Eight).
The end, you see, is rarely the end for the creator.
Does the process sound daunting? I’m grateful for it. I’m grateful for my editors, and my beta readers, and even my own despair of ever writing anything meaningful again… because it all combines to make for a better story, and in an age where absolute literary swill is heaped upon readers, I think they deserve that care.
My second and third published novels (written under a different name and published before the Internet, so now blessedly out of print) were put out by a very small publishing house that no longer exists. I was thrilled, of course, but the experience proved to me that it’s best to agonize over plot details before publication, not after.
What happened was that I grew up in France at a time when the United States seemed to us to comprise New York City and California, with not much in-between; and California was the land of the Beach Boys and endless sand. So I had a character walking along the beach… in San Jose.
San Jose is, of course, inland.
I never checked it, and whatever editing was offered by the publisher (very little, as I recall) didn’t catch it—but readers did! Back when it took real effort to complain to authors—via paper and USPS rather than a quick electronic dig—they did.
It was humiliating, of course; but I learned from it. And now I welcome criticism from the many people kind enough to give my work a read pre-publication.
Even if it means “the end” isn’t always the end!
Image credit: Natalia Blauth · Unsplash