Writer's Notes: Automatic Transmission

By and large, I prefer driving a vehicle with a manual
transmission. It makes no sense, considering I live in the city and tend
to drive like a race car driver (or so my husband thinks), which
generally requires a new clutch every five years or so. But my reasoning
has nothing to do with logic or good vehicle maintenance. 
It's simply more *fun* to drive a stick shift.
Our
Subaru is a manual, and I love it. Our new truck is an automatic, and I
love it too, but it took me several days of straight driving before my
right hand quit reaching for the stick (slightly less so for my left
foot to give up on the whole idea of a clutch). I like driving it
because I'm tall, I can see, and people get out of my way (I live in the
land of trucks, after all - if you don't have one, you know someone who
does). But it would still be more fun with a stick.

When
I'm writing, I generally have two gears - "Steady Wordcount" and
"OMGit'salmostfinishedgetitdoneyesterday!" It's a lot like having an
automatic transmission in my brain. When I start the story, I'm in
Drive, and I keep up a pretty steady pace for most of the journey. Sure,
some days I might downshift into that lower gear that gets you up the
super-steep hill, but it's pretty rare. I'm a pretty steady writer -
500-800 words per day, at least 4 -5 days a week year round. I get itchy
if we have to stop for too long in any one place. 
But
then I start getting near the end of a draft (I only write one,
thankfully), and there's a switch in my brain that just flips all on
it's own (it's annoying, to be honest). It shoves me up into high gear
(whether I want to be there or not), and suddenly, finishing the book
(whichever project I'm close to the end on) is all I can think about. I
have an insane amount of trouble focusing on anything else - eating, TV,
sleeping, the day job...it all goes by in a blur because it's just
"stuff" that has to be done so I can get back to finishing the damn
book. Hobbies, obligations, fun activities - none of them mean anything
at all to me when I'm in "finishing" gear.


As you might imagine, this gets really insane when I have more than one project nearing "The End" at the same time....
I
don't know how to turn this off - I seem to have lost the key or
something (not that I'd know where to put it if I had it). The only way
to shut it down is to finish the book(s) as fast as I can, so I can get
back to my normal, steady life.
This is where
being a "pantser" really isn't all that great...because I don't know
exactly where any given story will end until it just...does. I mean, I
know how it's going to end, generally speaking, and by the time I get
into high gear, I have a really good idea of how we're going to get
there, but it's still the characters telling me where to go -  I'm just
the driver. So we don't stop until they say we stop. 
Yes,
I've tried to control this before, tried to force my characters to wrap
things up on my own schedule. It's something I've done with nearly
every draft I've ever written....until recently. I've made a conscious
decision *not* to do that anymore, and it's *killing* me, but I'm
determined to see it through. The thing is, if I force the story to end
prematurely, I just have to go back and fix it later...and we all know
how much I *love* doing that (not!). So I get in, sit down, shut up, and
drive where the characters tell me to go. No seatbelts. We live on the
edge.
Do you have writing "gears"? Manual or automatic?

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