Being Done

I finished the first draft of my second novel today. You may be wondering why I said "second novel." Well, that's because the first novel is an absolutely horrible swords-and-sorcery fantasy that I began writing when I was fourteen. I finished it and then began writing a sequel and somewhere along the way, I completely lost interest in it. Both works are sitting on my hard drive to this day and both are somewhere around 88,000 words or so. Maybe some day I'll revisit them; hopefully, that will be after I'm super famous and people will enjoy them just because I wrote them, not because either book is actually any good.

Or maybe they'll just sit there in digital space until the end of time. That's pretty good, too.

But I'm not here today to talk about those old novels. I'm not even here to talk about the new novel (which isn't really that new, I've been working on the goddamn thing off and on since November 2009.)

I feel it's important to note that, even though the title of this post is "Being Done," I'm not actually done with the working part. This is just a first draft. That means now I get to begin the fun and enjoyable process of editing the manuscript in order to produce a final draft. The only metaphor I can think of to describe this process is this: imagine a dentist drilling his own teeth. Yeah.

In the days to come, I'll be forced to confront my own writing and all those moments where I had to silence my inner critic by saying to myself, "Self, fuck it, I know this is bad, but we'll catch it on the next draft. Well, now those moments get to leap out at me. Self-editing is a little bit like prancing naked through the streets. Except you're surrounded by hypercritical clones of yourself, all of which are far more critical and nitpicky than normal people would be.

I wrote that? Oh my God, I should kill myself.


That's my idea of a good line? I'm a monster. There should be a prison for writers and I should be incarcerated there without possibility of parole for writing a line that bad.


Really? What the fuck? You don't deserve to be allowed near a keyboard.


You get the idea. If writing is a mostly enjoyable exercise in indulging your creativity, editing is a systematic process of hating yourself and wondering why the fuck you bothered spending the last year and a half on a project as shitty and terrible as this one.

As you may be able to infer, I have a sort of love-hate relationship with the whole thing. I love the way my prose sounds after a good self-edit, but damn if I don't hate myself during the entire process. In fact, I used to hate doing it so much that (even though I knew it would improve my grade by a full letter or more) I would routinely turn in papers that I didn't edit, just because I hated going through it all.

People always seem surprised by the fact that I've never read any of my own work. Well, that's not true, I've read through a few short stories that I wrote, mostly for the editing process, and always because I wanted a better grade. To this day, however, I don't actually know what my novels are about. I mean, yeah, I wrote them, so I can tell you the plot and all, but it's akin to the way somebody who read Spark Notes can tell you about the plot to "the Scarlet Letter" or "Moby Dick." They get the idea, but they haven't really had the experience of reading it.

Regardless of the fact that I'm lying when I say that I'm done, there is a feeling of satisfaction and completion that comes with bringing a complete story into the world. It would probably be hyperbolic to say that it's like giving birth, since, you know, as a guy, my perspective on that whole particular topic is going to be different. Birth is this thing that sort of happens, I guess, I don't know. I don't really think about it too much.

But with this story, this creation of mine that has invested a year and a half of my thought, time, energy, effort, and emotion, the feeling that it's done comes with a sense of relief ("Thank God that's over with!) and regret ("I don't want to say goodbye yet!") and hopeful anxiety ("Fuck, I hope somebody else likes this thing."). Now that the first draft is done, now that the story itself exists in some complete shape, now I begin to wonder what its future will be, much in the manner, I imagine, that a parent wonders what their child will be. Will it succeed? Will it fail? Will anybody like it? I'll do everything I can to prepare this little story of mine for its first steps into the world, but ultimately, its fate is out of my hands, and that's a wonderful and exciting thing.