Circles
In the midst of getting ready for a novel to be published in fall, I’ve been finishing another that is full of firsts-for-me. I’m aiming it at those devoted readers aged 8 to 12 or so, which I’ve done before, but this one has some magical elements that I came to believe in as I wrote. The magic here is based on history, and I’ve worked from the way the past seems to speak. Yes, I pushed things around, plucked out false conceits, but a certain belief stayed through its core.
I’m not a writer who types “the end,” when I finish a draft, since I can hardly believe I’m done through those six letters, but I did send the manuscript off to the three people of my writing group. This is the first time I’ve made my way through a novel without showing them chapters, and I’m a little terrified. I’ve made my own way from one scene to another, and rigged each scene without the benefit of another’s good eyes. There’s always something, sometimes plenty, that I miss, but this offers them a full 35,000 words to kindly but astutely ferret out false steps.
But there’s a chance the opinions of other people may not be as harsh as my own are when I return to the work. Frankly the parts my writing group likes, which I’ll feel I should commit to, are as scary as the parts they might suggest I cut. I’ve become pretty handy with sharp blades. I feel some emptiness while the manuscript goes to their homes, but there’s joy, too. Not so much for what’s loosely called finishing. I made sure the sentences were sentences and logic held one chapter to the next, but the word “finishing” doesn’t seem quite right when I know their comments will send me right back to work.
It’s good to reach some sort of end for many reasons, and one is that it offers a chance to begin again. It’s been a period of hard looking at the structure of the parts and the whole, making at least semi-fast choices, and pinning down. I sometimes call on creativity to help fill small spaces between words, but finishing up one stage of book tends to be more about cleanup, and my mind and hands keep a steady grip. It gets a little tense. Starting something new lets me open my fist. I welcome back creativity in her more expansive guise, working in more open spaces. Once again, anything can happen. Everything can fly every-which-way. For a while, I can set words adrift like the puff on dandelions gone by. Beginning means I get to let words loose and scatter, during this time when the lilacs have faded, but iris bloom.
