Crossing the Finish Line

From Writer Unboxed: Crossing the Finish Line

I am breathtakingly, tantalizingly close—so close I can feel it, taste it (it is sweet), and see it. And what I see are the words “THE END” typed across the bottom of my 300+ page manuscript. I can’t wait.

What a rush, right? It’s like those moments we’ve witnessed in the Olympics, when Simone Biles nails the triple-double and sticks the landing, or sprinter Julien Alfred crosses the finish line to clinch the first-ever Olympic medal (gold) for her tiny country (St. Lucia). Years of hard, often discouraging work culminating in something you weren’t sure would ever happen. Finishing a novel can feel like that. It’s a huge accomplishment.

Which is why approaching the end of a book can be a treacherous path, because the temptation to hurry up and get there already is powerful.

YES YES YES, with the caveat that I’m looking at “THE END” typed across the bottom of a 1200-page manuscript.

Actually, I’m fine with the hurry-up urge, which is, by the way, producing a heck of a lot of words in August compared to, say, June. (It was 30,000 words in June; it’s already past 45,000 words halfway through August.) A lot of words in a hurry is GOOD. It just means you’ll probably be doing a fair bit of revision to those words later. That’s how it works for me.

I catch myself sometimes taking shortcuts, rushing to get to a certain climactic scene, writing scenes that aren’t as essential or tight as they need to be because hey, it’s forward momentum. 

So? Rushing to get to (or, in my case, through) climactic scenes really IS forward momentum. It’s only a problem if you don’t bother to tighten it up later. Actually, the linked point is kind of making the same point, which surprises me a bit considering the beginning of the post.

The post winds up with a great couple of paragraphs:

Savor it. Finally, we write for a lot of reasons, but I assume that all of us write because, on the most elemental level, we love it. We love crafting sentences and creating characters and building worlds and trying to say something essential about what it means to be human. Books can and do change lives—heck, sentences can change lives.

I recently finished reading a book I loved, Niall Williams’ This Is Happiness. This sentence stopped me cold: “…I came to understand him to mean you could stop at, not all, but most of the moments of your life, stop for one heartbeat and, no matter what the state of your head or heart, say This is happiness, because of the simple truth that you were alive to say it.”

That really is a great sentence. That reminds me of the days immediately after I was involved in a (very minor, truly!) car accident in which my car flipped over. Thanks to my seatbelt and luck, I was perfectly fine, and walked around for many days thinking things like, “Walking! Look at this! How nice to be able to do this!”

Here is the first chapter of This is Happiness.

***

It had stopped raining.

***

That’s it. That’s the entirety of chapter one. How do you feel about that? Charmed? Amused? Irritated at the artificiality of starting a book with a chapter that is four words long? I am in fact feeling charmed and amused.

Here is the beginning of the second chapter:

***

Nobody in Faha could remember when it started. Rain there on the western seaboard was a condition of living. It came straight down and sideways, frontwards, backwards, and any other wards God could think of. It came in sweeps, in waves, sometimes in veils. It came dressed as drizzle, as mizzle, as mist, as showers, frequent and widespread, as a wet fog, as a damp day, a drop, a dreeping, and an out-and-out downpour. It came the fine day, the bright day, and the day promised dry. It came at any time of the day and night, and in all seasons, regardless of calendar and forecast, until in Faha your clothes were rain and your skin was rain and your house was rain with a fireplace. It came off the gray vastness of an Atlantic that threw itself against the land like a lover once spurned and resolved not to be so again. It came accompanied by seagulls and smells of salt and seaweed. It came with cold air and curtained light. It came like a judgment, or, in benign version, like a blessing God had forgotten he had left on. It came for a handkerchief of blue sky, came on westerlies, sometimes — why not? — on easterlies, came in clouds that broke their backs on the mountains in Kerry and fell into Clare, making mud the ground and blind the air. It came disguised as hail, as sleet, but never as snow. It came softly sometimes, tenderly sometimes, its spears turned to kisses, in rain that pretended it was not rain, that had come down to be closer to the fields whose green it loved and fostered, until it drowned them.

All of which, to attest to the one truth: In Faha, it rained.

But now, it had stopped.

***

I’m still amused and charmed. I picked up a sample. I’ve never read anything by this author before, but perhaps this is that rare object: a literary novel that, rather than wallowing in despair and ennui, invites the reader to notice moments of happiness.

Dreeping does, by the way, appear to be a real, if unusual, word.

Verb

dreep (third-person singular simple present dreeps, present participle dreeping, simple past and past participle dreeped)

1. (Scotland) To lower oneself from a height and drop the remaining distance.