Stepping back
The End.
I’ve written those words again. I’ve unwound the thread of my story all the way to its finish. Now I have to look it over to see what more needs doing, and what needs doing differently.
It’s a difficult mental adjustment. I’ve been living with this thing for weeks, working away at the level of paragraphs and sentences. Now I have to try to put myself into the mind of a reader who is coming to it for the first time. It’s like the moment when a painter makes the last tiny stroke on his canvas with his finest brush, and then steps back to look.
In fact, if he’s sensible, he doesn’t just step back. He walks out of the room, makes a cup of coffee, digs the potato patch or something and only then does he walk back in and look at it. That’s because he wants to see it as a whole, without focusing immediately on that bit there that he’s always known isn’t quite right.
The writer has the additional problem that it’s impossible to read the whole book in one glance. He has to work his way through it from the beginning. And it’s very, very easy to start getting distracted and to think that this sentence here would be so much better if only we took out the comma, or something. But we have to ignore that sort of thing at this stage. We’re trying – however futile it might be – to get an overview.
One tip that might be useful is to print the whole book out and to read it like that. Words are much harder to fiddle with once they’re on paper. And while I try not to use the print button more than I have to (because I do want there to be a planet for my children to enjoy) there are times when you just have to let the trees go hang.
Another tip is to let time elapse. This is one case where tomorrow really will be better than today, and next week will be better still. And while I’m about it, and if I really want to clear my mind of this stuff I’ve been doing, perhaps I should begin writing something else. Maybe that’s the answer – a chapter or two of something completely different.
So what will it be? Ah, yesss….