End Game

I have now written the last piece of the plot of my W.I.P. and have only a chapter or so of ‘loose ends’ to tidy up. Am I celebrating? Actually, no. Because I find writing the act of finishing a novel a strangely vicarious pleasure. Last time it proved no pleasure at all, but more an uncomfortable act of separation. I wrote nothing for several weeks afterwards.

Even now as I realise that the end (and not quite the end I had planned) is in sight for Ailsa, I can feel a bit of a dark moment creeping over me. This time I do have other projects to attend to, but I feel sure that when I have written the last sentence I won’t want to go back to this book for quite some time. I could of course simply finish it of and send it out for critiquing, but I already know there are elements of the first section which need to be changed. Sending it out ‘warts and all’ doesn’t feel quite right. On the other hand, waiting until the spirit moves me to go back to it could result in a long gap – good for the book, perhaps, but not in line with the target I have set myself of having a finished article in time for this year’s Winchester conference.

Foreseeing this difficulty, I have come up with a cunning plan. I am going to hold back from that last chapter and attempt to do my tidying now. Having reached the end in my head, I should be able to see how the plot as a whole shapes up and, with this in mind, I have rewritten my synopsis. It looks, I think, pretty tidy, except that the novel itself doesn’t quite match – so some work to do there!

This experimental game (of pretending not to be finished) may not work. Perhaps I’m too close to it to make a decent job of rejigging it at this point. But I think it’s worth a try. If all else fails I can revert to my original file and try again later.

If you want to know the outcome, watch this space!

Long and Short (2)

Adding the new Short Fiction page has prompted some reflections on writing.

There’s an idea in circulation that a short story is in some way harder to write than a novel. I don’t think for a minute that this is the case, but looking at the relative word-count, the effort to get 3000 words right does feel disproportionate compared to, say, 100,000. Come to think of it, my stories usually start at around 3,500 and end up just over 2000, so there seems to be a law of diminishing returns in there somewhere. Short stories, in view of their brevity, also lend themselves to microscopic examination, and  I remember John Ravenscroft (former editor of Cadenza) describing them as the ‘shetland ponies’ of the fiction world, by which I think he meant they were short but showy (rather than cute but bad-tempered!) At any rate, they should never be tackled by anyone with a low ‘completer finisher’ score on the Belbin grid!

 

On the other hand, the process of writing fiction of any length is, at least in my case, basically the same:

 

• Get the story down
• Adjust it in terms of structure, pace and resolution until you’ve said what you wanted to say
• Put it aside, find out what others think and take another look at it yourself
• Have another go
• Get more feedback (and/or take another break)
• Carry out a detailed line edit
• Do another edit
• Possibly another
• Repeat last 4 steps for as long as it takes

Try factoring this up to the 30+ chapters and 100+ scenes of a novel, and no wonder it’s such hard work!