On the Road to The End

There's a question that comes up repeatedly among writers. How do you know when something is done? Really, really done. The answer is usually, "You just know." It's a bit like falling in love. If you don't know for sure, you aren't there.

I always thought this was pretty much pure bunk. At least I did, until this past month when I felt the novel's energy shift, and realized that I was, for the first time in my life, getting to the end. Not just finishing a draft, but ending a novel. The change was unmistakable. There have been moments of pure elation, and moments of devastating sorrow. Total joy, and total immersion in the world of my novel, the characters, what's happening to them, and finally knowing, really knowing, that I have taken this novel as far and as deep as I can, and that it has repeatedly wrung me dry. 

The photograph at the top of this post is from the moment when it really hit me that the novel is coming to an end.

My family and I were in Reno for the weekend. We used to live there. My in-laws still do. And my novel is set there. A key moment in the novel happens looking at this view of Sierra Street on the skyway between the El Dorado casino and the parking garage. We were heading back to my car when I looked at the street and realized this was the last time I would visit Reno and look at the city with both my eyes and the eyes of my narrator, Matt. I've had this thought before. But this time it was real. How do I know? Because I promptly lost it. Completely. Embarrassingly. Trying to cry silently looking out the window at Sierra Street because I had just realized what the mourning process is going to look like when I say goodbye to these characters who have lived in my head for so long, who have been my constant companions for the past three very intense years of writing. 

I've finished drafts before. When I finished the third draft of this novel, I thought it was done and started querying. But, in my heart of hearts, I knew it wasn't. I'd been working on this story as a novel for two years at that point (this novel started out as a short story, then morphed into a novella, and finally, five years ago, declared that it was a novel. Which is a post for another time because I know a lot of writers who go through a similar evolution with stories -- it's almost like our psyches have to trick us because the declaration that "I am writing a novel" is so intimidating we would never start), and I wanted to go back to the novel I had enrolled in grad school to complete. 

But I knew it wasn't done. 

There were lots of clues -- the lack of elation when I got to the end of the draft; the fact that when my best friend asked what I was going to do to celebrate finishing, I just shrugged and said, "Go to Disneyland?"; not having a lot of enthusiasm for writing query letters; the fact that when I was asked by an editor at Squaw if I had passion for this novel, I nearly broke into tears because I felt so drained and tired of it (as opposed to drained and I want to tell everyone about my novel because I love it so much) -- things like that. In retrospect, I should have known. 

As a submissions reader, I see lots of novels that are being queried one draft too early. They are almost there, but the pacing is a bit off, the major themes underdeveloped, the opening not as crisp and fully-formed as it needs to be. There are still lingering traces of the birthing process -- the moments when the writer flails because he or she doesn't know quite how to get the characters from where they are to where they are going. These are novels that are going to get form rejections for the most part. Maybe a few of them will get a more detailed response, but most of them are going to get a pass from the agent for the simple reason that, yes, they show promise, but they need another revision. 

I was very fortunate to meet an agent while I was at Squaw who took the time to tell me my novel wasn't finished, that it needed another revision, and has been exceedingly patient with me while I completed TWO more complete rewrites on it to get it to where it is now. 

Having gotten this far in the process, I do have to say, if you do not know, in your heart of hearts, that your novel has ENDED, completely and totally ENDED, it probably isn't done. As frustrating as it is to hear (and I know it's frustrating -- I spent six months resisting the idea that my novel wasn't done and I would have to go back into it and rebuild it from the ground up before I wrote a single word of the fourth draft), you will know when it is done. It will be a slap across the face, a gut punch, an unmistakable knife through the heart. It will leave you both shattered and wanting to embrace the entire world. It is different for every writer, for every novel. 

What it isn't, is a shrug of the shoulder, an "I guess," or simply typing 'THE END' at the bottom of a page. 

The Story So Far

I find myself in a really odd place right now: I am alone in my own head. I finished my edits and the novel is now in the hands of an agent, so there's nothing really to do with it until she comes back with a response (okay, except for a couple of things. I spoke with one of my readers last night who pointed out places where he just couldn't suspend disbelief that the story was being told by a 14-year old. As he said, "No fourteen year old boy would say 'little old lady flats.' I'm gay, and even I wouldn't have noticed that at fourteen." Point taken). I've kind of been sitting here thinking, well, now what do I do with my time?

Answer: Get to work on the next novel.

So it's back to the generative phase of writing for me, which is exciting. I love the peaks and valleys of this stage of writing. In some ways, it's a heck of a lot easier to get things done (like grocery shopping on a regular basis) because a lot of my thinking, processing, letting things fall into place can happen during the day while the actually putting words down in a logical order portion of it can happen late at night or even very early in the morning. I found the editing worked best during the daytime. Whenever I tried to edit or rewrite after nine at night, I fell asleep or my brain was sluggish. It took a lot of will power to work within the analytical portion of my brain after the sun went down.

I'm excited, though. The next novel is the project which made me apply for grad school. I had written another novel about fifteen years ago that fell apart just at the point where an agent was interested in seeing it. I'd worked on it for several years and, in a workshop, the workshop leader asked me what was the most essential question about the novel and I couldn't answer it. At that point, I realized I was at a dead end. That experience started me on a journey to learn craft so that I would not end up at the same point with the next thing I wrote. I spent many years doing workshops, going to conferences, reading and reading and reading, and, ultimately, going to grad school and getting my MFA in a program that was exceptional for teaching craft and process. (as an aside, it was during an assignment in grad school that I figured out what went wrong with that other novel and will probably go back to it at some point because I still love those characters - as briefly as I can, what happened to that novel was not knowing how to listen to critique group feedback and forgetting what my original vision for the novel was while I tried to revise to answer all the group's concerns. The assignment that made me realize this was to write a synopsis of a novel. I dusted off my old synopsis for this novel, rewrote it and was so pleased with it, I sent it to a friend who had been part of that critique group. She responded that she hadn't understood a key element of the novel's conceit (and neither did the workshop leader, and, for that matter, neither did I by that point in trying to revise it). It made me realize what had happened to that novel and radically changed how I listen to feedback)

At the time I started grad school, I had an idea for a new novel. An idea that was so good, so exciting, that I just didn't want to screw it up. I spent my first year in grad school working on it, had a pretty complete outline, and about a hundred pages written. Then, stuck for a second story to submit to the class in Alice La Plante's fiction workshop, I asked her if I could bring the original draft of a short story I'd written - I got a couple of grants with the story, had gotten some really good rejection letters (most notably, a personal note on a form rejection from The New Yorker), and, in the process of trying to revise it, it had started to unpack itself and was now a novella. I wanted to get some feedback and see if I was on the right track with my revisions. Alice said yes, so I brought the story in, got some really good feedback, and then went back to work on the novel. A couple of months later, I took a half-day workshop with another really gifted SFSU professor, Matthew Davidson. Matthew gave us an exercise and I literally walked across the room thinking about a scene from the novel that I wanted to work on, sat down at a desk to write it, and what came out was a scene from the story. I had been struggling with this scene because I didn't understand what it needed to do. The scene fell into place as I wrote through this exercise and, at the end of it, the story "came out" and declared itself to be a novel and told me in no uncertain terms that I was going to be working on it until it was done.

110,000 words later, that novel is The Altar of Dead Pets.

So, now it's time to let Matt grow up and go out into the world (which, in a funny way, is the movement of that novel), and get reacquainted with Nikki and Owen and their 17-year old son Marcus and the twins, Amanda and Leo. Time to let bitchy Catherine and her sister Helen out of their kennels. Time to shift from living in Reno in March to living on the Sonoma Coast in summer. Time for research and exploring and stumbling through scenes and reminding myself over and over again that it doesn't matter how mundane the words in the first draft are, they will become vivid and wonderful by the time I'm done and I will fall in love these characters as I did with Matt and Denny and everyone else in their screwed up family. In short, it's time to write.