I Had Written a Book. So Why Didn't It Feel Like It?

There is supposed to be a moment when you finish writing a book. At least that's how I always imagined it. You type the final words, sit back, stare at the screen for a moment, and experience some enormous rush of satisfaction because you've finally done this thing you've been trying to do for years. Maybe some writers get that. I mostly got a rough draft and a rapidly expanding list of things I thought were wrong with it.

The Moving Finish Line

That's slightly unfair because I was proud of finishing it. Somewhere underneath all the noise, I knew I'd finally managed to get the entire story from one end to the other, and that wasn't nothing. The problem was that the little voice that had spent years telling me I couldn't write a book simply changed jobs. Fine, it said. You've written one. But is it any good? Does the pacing work? Is that scene too long? Is this character believable? Have I explained too much here and not enough there? Does anybody besides me actually give a damn what happens to these people? And, of course, the old favourite was still there. What if those people who told me my writing was crap were right?

Editing the Editing

So I started editing. Then I edited the things I'd edited. Then I discovered that changing something later in the story meant something earlier no longer worked properly, which affected another scene, which meant I needed to go back another hundred pages and change something else. You eventually reach a point where you begin to suspect the manuscript is doing this deliberately. I could read a chapter one day and think, This is actually pretty damn good. I'd come back two days later, read the exact same words, and wonder what mentally deficient idiot had written them. Since I was the mentally deficient idiot in question, this wasn't particularly encouraging.

Too Close to See It

There's another problem nobody can really solve for you once you've spent years inside a story. You can't read it for the first time. You know what happens. You know why a throwaway sentence matters three hundred pages later. You know which character is lying. You know why somebody reacts the way they do because you've lived in their head while writing the scene. A reader knows none of that. By the time you've written and edited a manuscript repeatedly, you've lost any ability to experience it the way somebody opening Chapter One for the first time will experience it. That's where I was. I knew I had a manuscript. I knew there were parts of it I loved. I knew there were parts I wanted to improve. What I didn't know was whether I had a book. By that, I mean something another person would willingly pick up, disappear into, care about, and keep reading because they genuinely wanted to know what happened next. So I kept editing. Apparently typing THE END, or ---FIN---, or I'M DONE doesn't mean you've reached the end. It just means you've unlocked an entirely new category of things to worry about.