E________, first draft: 96,300 words (complete).
I am finally done! The first draft of E________ is finished! It’s taken a whole year – six months more than I thought it would. Of course, that was in the heady days before the invasion of Ukraine became all-consuming, combined with a move from Pittsburgh to Edinburgh, so I suppose I should be gratified that I finished at all. I was typing away in an early-morning coffee shop on the Lothian Road, realized that the last sentence I had written was, in fact, the last sentence, paused for a moment, and banged out the two words writers fantasize about from time to time: “THE END.”
In movies, when a writer types “The End,” he or she really means it. The actor’s face registers a sense of achievement (broad grin, wry smile, whatever), they lean back, reach for a stiff drink, loved one, or both, and wait for the end credits to show up.
Of course, as I now know, typing “The End” like this simply means that I am done with the first draft. I will walk away from the MS for several weeks, until it’s half-forgotten, and then return for a second draft, and then a third. After which it will go to my agent, the estimable Brady, who will make a number of excellent suggestions requiring more drafting, after which (fingers crossed) it will go out to the publishers, whose editors will have further suggestions of their own. I did play around once with not typing “The End” until everything was finished, but the actual end (sometime after the copy editors have had their say) occurs after the text is set in stone, so it’s simply not practical – unless, I suppose, you want to add “The End” as an eleventh-hour correction accompanied by profuse apologies.
Er . . . no.
But even though I knew that typing “The End” was not a statement of truth, I still leaned back with a smile of triumph and reached out for a slug of coffee (which always tastes better if you don’t have to make it yourself). Because if typing “The End” isn’t strictly true, it’s not quite a lie, either. It is a stage in the process, and a really important one. You have written a novel, after all. Everything else is, in a sense, just tidying up. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, a first draft is not the end of the story, it’s not even the beginning of the end. But it is, most definitely, the end of the beginning.