Finishing School

why is it so hard to complete a book?

I know how my novel-in-progress ends. I’ve written some of the final scenes. But I’ve been working on the last third for a long time, and it’s starting to seem a little pathological. I’ve finished a lot of projects before, including my two published novels, Metropolis and When the World Was Young, and a couple others that are still making their way into the world. Not that it was ever easy, but I must know how to do this, right? I thought I’d take this week’s post as an opportunity to think about my own situation with my novel-in-progress, The Brooklynites (it’s the in-between-quel to my first two novels), and on finishing books in general.

There are so many possible reasons one doesn’t finish a project, first and foremost, perhaps, the anxiety about the reception the project will have when one sends it out into the world. Then there all the decisions one has to make to get there — each one meaning that some alternate version of the story or the language or the ideas behind it all must be sacrificed. There are technical challenges: all the threads and themes, storylines and character arcs that need to be tied up, snipped off, or otherwise completed. There are big questions, such as whether the reader will be satisfied and or the story has any point. Was it worth writing, much less reading?

It’s a lot of work, finishing the frayed end of a narrative into something presentable, but not necessarily any harder than coming up with the idea in the first place or writing the hundreds of pages that one (myself, for example) has already written.

So, here are my strategies for getting closer to that finish line. I hope some of them will be useful to you in finishing your big project, and I’l keep you posted about my progress with mine.

My present goal with The Brooklynites is to delineate the terrain of the final third, making a sort of map or list of chapters and scenes that I can tackle one by one. It’s no longer the time for browsing research material or rambling free writing or introducing new characters. Almost everything in this part needs to work toward closing the loops on what I’ve written out so far. Or to change the metaphor, there’s a set of narrative doors I’ve opened; now I need to close them behind me.

To get there, I’ll do several mappings of what I’ve written already. I’ve been reading from book aloud at The 24-Hour Room’s Thursday open mic nights for the past couple months, and it has been very helpful to hear it aloud and have others hear what I’ve written. But it will take a long time to read the whole book aloud, so I’ll dive in and read the whole thing over with an eye to charting the patterns in the story. First I’ll map out my characters, tracking when, how often and for how long they each appear, looking for rhythms so I can perpetuate them through to the end. If my main character, Stella, appears in two out of every three chapters, for example, I’ll want to make sure I keep her presence up at about that rate throughout. She shouldn’t dominate four consecutive chapters, because I need to keep up the B and C storylines, too, and stop in on my secondary and tertiary characters. I’ll do this kind of tracking for every character of importance, think hard about why they need to be in the story and how they can complete their narrative purpose by the end. I’ll do similar mappings of the themes and imagery I’ve deployed, making sure I’ve carried them through the entire book and developed them in a way that makes them meaningful — or at least resonant. I’ll track the timelines to double check that the story makes sense in terms of the hours, days, seasons and years that it covers. With The Brooklynites, I have two periods of fairly compressed time separated by a bridge section — inspired by the Time Passes section of To the Lighthouse — that fairly quickly spans a decade. I’ll ask myself again if leaning on Woolf for this structure is a sound choice and whether the varying rates at which time passes in the different sections are clear to the reader.

I expect all these system reviews to give rise to a list of the scenes that I still need to write (and some others that I need to cut or edit heavily). My route to finishing this draft, if past experience holds, will be to tackle them one by one, but crucially for me, not necessarily consecutively. I’ll write the scenes I’m most excited by first, and if there end up being some that I’m not particularly inspired to write, I’ll dig back into those structural maps I made and try to find a way around them, because any scene I don’t really want to write is certainly going to be dull and plodding, a scene that nobody wants to read either.

When the final third — and thus the first full draft — is finally done, I’ll go back and read it over as quickly as I can manage to, either on paper or on my iPad, avoiding making too many marks on the manuscript, with just a pencil and notepad nearby for any big notes I want to make to myself about flow and pace. I’ll take some time to process the big picture, go in and fix what I think needs fixing, and with any luck, if it feels like the shape is right, I’ll then be ready for a slower, closer read through — perhaps out loud — which will be largely about fine tuning the language. At that point, it might be time to get over that anxiety I mentioned at the outset and share the whole thing with some readers…

Wish me luck and determination. I do the same for you!