Tag: finishing a first draft

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Still Alive

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Not sure if I’ve mentioned it before ’round these parts, but I’m something of a video game nerd. One of my favorites is Portal, which is not your typical first person shooter; it’s a sciencey puzzle game. With a science gun. That you use to do science. And survive.

Ahh, got nostalgic for a moment there, pardon me.

Anyway, the game features a somewhat insane rogue AI computer that tries to kill the protagonist, but — SPOILER ALERT (And man do I feel dumb typing a spoiler alert on a game that’s eight years old, but such is the internet) — you end up killing the computer instead. With science. Kind of. Then, during the end credits, the computer (who is not really dead, but is in fact still alive) sings a song to you (yeah, it’s that kind of game) about how even though you’ve destroyed the testing facility and reduced the AI to a shell of its former self, the experiments it was conducting have been a complete success, and that’s awesome.

It’s weird and charming and strangely catchy, and also it was written by the very very funny Jonathan Coulton, so there’s that.

Linda’s prompt for the week is “still,” and when I heard it, that song was the first thing that I heard of. Because I just finished my second novel’s first draft, and I realized that I feel a lot like I did when I finished my first novel’s first draft. In fact, both of those feels feel strikingly similar (I imagine) to the way GLaDOS feels at the end of Portal.

Let me try to relate the feeling.

You’ve spent months hammering away at the draft, banging away with your wordhammer at the anvil of your blank slate, and suddenly, almost without warning, it’s time to end it. And you pen an ending which is, truly, just awful. If you were a gymnast trying to wrap up a routine, this ending is you falling off the balance beam, smacking your face against the beam on the way down, faceplanting when you hit the mat, and giving a thumbs-up to the crowd wacthing in horrified silence to show that you’re okay despite the terrible tumble you took. And then your thumb falls off.

And then all emotion flees from you, like the tide rushing out ahead of a tsunami. You’ve accomplished something, but you’re not exactly sure what it was, and the cost has been tremendous. You look behind you and behold the burned and twisted wreckage of your passage.

But you’re still alive.

Very little went to plan, you didn’t really get the result you expected, and you definitely don’t have any idea if the thing you’ve created is any good. You feel like you should be happy. You are — kind of — but it’s mitigated by this sense of emptiness, this impassable gulf of whatnextitude. The emotions come crashing back in, all of them at once. Crushing you under their weight. Happiness. Sadness. Accomplishment. Dread.

But you’re still alive.

The factory is in ruins. Everything you thought your story was, and everything you thought you were as a writer, has been blasted to pieces. Salvageable pieces, pieces that look like they might fit back together somehow, but certainly not in the configuration you had before, and certainly not in any way that makes sense right now. Inwardly, secretly, in a dark corner of yourself that you don’t visit too often, you wonder if you can do it again, if you can face the tremendous task of picking up the pieces, cleaning up the wreckage, and going to work on the story again to shape it, mold it, make it right. It all seems too much, like you’ve been asked to clean up a landfill with a push broom.

But you’re still alive.

The work behind wasn’t pretty, and for that matter, neither is the work ahead.

But you’re still alive.

Which means it isn’t time to stop working yet.

This weekly Re-Motivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every Saturday, I use LindaGHill‘s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

Finish Line Full of Magnets

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I’m not a big fan of biographies, but I read Andre Agassi’s autobio a few years ago. Some fantastic stories about how much pain he was secretly suffering through the last years of his career. Some insane tales of a father who made him hit something like five thousand tennis balls every day (if you hit a million tennis balls in a year, you can’t help but become the best in the world!). But for some reason, the thing that most stuck out for me was his take on winning a match.

I noodled around with tennis a little bit, and even an idiot like me can grasp the wisdom of what he had to say. I’m butchering his words, but he likened winning a match to a magnet: You’re in the match, and then you catch a little bit of a break and all of a sudden you can’t lose. The closer you get to the finish, the more it pulls you along. But, just like a magnet, the closer you get, the more it resists you, the more it pushes you away, until you’re right at the brink of winning and you can’t conceive of any possible way to get there.

Things, as I may have mentioned before, don’t always have to mean things. Sometimes a bit of wisdom about tennis is just a bit of wisdom about tennis. Then again, I’m an English teacher by trade, which means I can draw meaning from the swirls of foam in toddler vomit. So off I go generalizing:

Finishing this first edit is like winning a tennis match. I struggled mightily for months to find a foothold. I thought my ideas were terrible, my draft was terrible, the plans I had for fixing it were actually breaking it. (I still harbor doubts, but it’s getting a little late for that.) Then — and I couldn’t pinpoint the moment for the life of me — something changed, and I gained in confidence, and I found the work coming easier and easier. It flowed like so much blood from a severed artery.

And then I realized how close I was to the end.

Not the end. The first edit is only the first step in a journey that will no doubt leave me footsore and sweaty, bloody and probably a little disoriented. But the end of a pretty important step. A step at the end of which I am going to unfetter my little creation and let it flap out into the wild, presumably into the maws of several prowling beasts.

I’m going to let people read it. Other people, outside of the insulated, well-padded room I built for myself in my brain, are going to read this story, meet my characters, and start sticking pointy things in their soft bits. And that’s a highly encouraging thing, because I need some serious feedback if I want to make sure the story works. But it’s also a terrifying thing. Like, it might turn out that the story is as compelling as a pile of gerbil turds. Maybe the characters are as likable as Maleficent, you know, before they flipped it and told the story from her side.

Maybe, in short, I’ve spent the past nine months writing, and I’d have been better off doing, I dunno, ANYTHING else. Collecting stamps. Growing a garden. Learning to crochet.

And what felt like a magnet pulling me toward the finish line now feels like a magnet pushing me away from it. I’m terrified to finish, so I’m hiding from the work. It’s easy. There’s no shortage of excuses and reasons to keep me from working on it. But I think the sad, simple fact is that I’m terrified of turning it over and letting it out of my little cage.

But I guess I have to let it go eventually. Cut the cord. Empty the nest.

I’ll probably be done with the edit in a couple of weeks. And that’s awesome.

But terrifying.

But mostly awesome.

But still terrifying.

…But awesome.