(E________, first draft: 18,800 words).
All things (except, perhaps, Covid) come to an end. The year is winding down, my son is finishing his first semester at college, my work on Braking Day is done. It is more difficult to say goodbye than I thought.
As some of you will know, I have spent most of my adult life working as a lawyer. Before I was a lawyer, though, I was a law student. One of the courses they teach larval lawyers is research. It’s hard to explain the feeling you get when you are first introduced to “the law,” an endless array of rules, regulations and the collected decisions of judges going back hundreds of years. Faced with so much information, it is easy to believe that the answer to every possible problem is in there somewhere. All you have to do is look.
That, alas, is not true. People, it turns out, are way more complicated than 600 years of legal lore. Sometimes the answer is in there. But usually not. Research gets you part but not all of the way. And yet, how do you know, really know, that the answer isn’t lurking out there among the thousands upon thousands of cases that you haven’t read? This is the conundrum that leads generation after generation of law students to ask variations of the same plaintive question: “How do I know when to stop?” The answer is usually something along the lines of, “When it feels right.” Decades into legal practice, I still have difficulty formulating a more useful response.
I did not think the same issue would arise when it came to novel writing. This, after all, is not an exercise where you have to track down information left behind by other people. You have complete control of the process. You think up a story, you write it down, you tinker with it to make it run smoothly, and you push it out the door. Job done.
Hah! Then your agent comes back with “suggestions” (repeat as necessary), which you dutifully attempt to accommodate. And after that your editor at the publishing house does the same thing (likewise endlessly repeatable).
After that, your “final” manuscript goes to the copyeditor who not only comes back with an intimidating list of grammatical and style-related corrections, but also points out embarrassing lapses in narrative (in my case, the sitting character who somehow opened a door). And once that’s done, you still have to read and check the final proof. The proof is the version of the book that will go to the printers. Does it match the manuscript you negotiated with agent, editor, and copyeditor? Are there any last-minute typos that still need to be corrected?
I finished proofreading Braking Day last Saturday at 6:49 am EST in my local coffee shop. On the other side of the plate glass windows it was still dark, and I had the place to myself. The proofreading, as it turned out, went very smoothly. There were a few teeny tiny nits but nothing major. There is now nothing left for me to do. I am done. Everything that remains is in the hands of the publisher, the booksellers and (most importantly of all) the readers.
I started Braking Day almost exactly four years ago, in December 2017. I have written and rewritten it at least eight times. As I sat back from my laptop and stared out the window into the darkened street, I expected to feel a sense of triumph, of deep satisfaction in a job well done. And I did. Kind of.
But what I also felt was a sense of regret. Not because I will miss writing Braking Day (although I will) but because there are scenes in the final version that I desperately, desperately want to have another go at. If I had my time again, I am certain I could make them better. One scene in particular, which my agent, the estimable Brady, suggested I make longer, is not long enough. I couldn’t figure out how to do it at the time and now I can. But it’s too late.
I think the truth (a truth?) about novel writing is this. A novel can never be perfect. It can only (if you’re lucky) be good. Once it’s good, you have to let it go.
And doing so will never, ever, feel right.