“You have to finish things — that’s what you learn from, you learn by finishing things.”
– Neil Gaiman
While the process of writing can be painful, excruciating, something like having your teeth extracted, when you’ve plugged away for a few hours, or even just a few minutes and can look up and see all that you’ve done? It feels good.
Even though I’ve got the attention span of a squirrel on methamphetamines, I sure as shiny knows how good it feels when you get to the end of a draft. Even if you know it’s garbage and dread the very idea of having to go back and begin editing, you can actually say: I finished this!
It’s a celebratory feat, because getting there can be the hardest thing.
Ideas are the easy part. Crafting a story and weaving your characters through a rich plot in your world is really, really hard. Sometimes you feel like you’re gaining incredible ground only to round a corner and fall flat on your face, and you’re left wondering where you went wrong.
Sometimes you’ve painted yourself into a corner with no way out.
Sometimes you’re simply ground to a half without a clue how to proceed.
Take a moment to clear your head. Go for a walk in nature, ride a bike, visit a friend, play with your pets. Recharge your batteries, then come back and start putting one word in front of the other.
If you’re truly, genuinely devoid of any solution to your snag, push yourself away from the screen, grab a fresh sheet of paper and write down your climax at the top.
Leaving a space or two between lines for additional notes, start working backwards. What happens before the climax? What does your MC need to find or learn or achieve in order to succeed? What does the antagonist do to slow them down or throw them off track?
Work backwards, or ziggidy-zaggedy depending how the ideas come, until you’ve traced your route back to the predicament that has you stuck. Take a moment to draw your arrows or number things to make sure all is in order, and behold your outline. It might not be your be all/end all once the words start to flow, but it’s the lifeline to see the light at the end of the tunnel from where you are.
Now write.
This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy, and that hard.
– Neil Gaiman
While learning from the process is invaluable for the writer’s journey, what you glean by being able to examine your story from start to finish, leaving nothing out, is something else entirely. Give yourself a break from it, and you’ll see it in a whole new light.
When you get to the last word of the last sentence of the last page, when you get to put a period on the page, and maybe even a celebratory “THE END”, relish that moment. Do a happy dance and celebrate because you finished what you started and it feels so good.
What’s the best part about writing a book? Finishing it.
– Rick Riordan
Once you have a story from start to finish, you can share it, and get feedback from your friend or your mom or even someone else who might be completely honest with you about it, and maybe after all that you can start the revision process. But remember, no matter how it is received and no matter how much work still lies ahead of you, you’ve accomplished something wonderful.
Writing is hard. That’s why so few people stick to it and actually finish things. And why you have a right to be immensely proud when you finish something.
– Andy Ihnatko