I’ve been in the process of writing the end of my novel for… well, months now. My wordcount goal for the book is 90,000-100,000 words, and at the moment I’m just around 91k. I’m so close to the end here, but writing it is like that paradox where each step you take halves the distance left to go—you’ll never reach the end, because the distance left can always be divided in half.
That’s an overdramatic way of saying that endings are hard. Beginnings have an infinite amount of potential, but by the time you’ve reached the end, every thread of the story has to be tied up neatly. That’s why this is the point in the process where you start having all sorts of ideas for new stories: your brain is making a frantic effort to avoid the hard thinking. Whenever I try thinking of the ending of this story, my brain starts whispering but wouldn’t it be so much easier to just play Minecraft? Yes, brain, yes it would. That’s a fantastic idea.
I took the above picture on a drive down to Newport with Rob and William for a write-in at Empire Tea last week. Rob has a highly admirable work ethic, and has been powering through a rewrite of his sci fi epic over the last few months while I’ve been tootling around with my novel. It’s very inspiring, and in fact whenever I meet up with him for a few hours of writing, I do get a lot done. If only I could hire him to sit full time in my office, typing away industriously, to guilt me into getting more done. He’d look at me disapprovingly whenever I fired up Minecraft.
My current goal is to get the draft done by April 1. That’s 8 days, not counting today, to write the last 8,000 or so words. Doable? We’ll see.
Bennett North 