Ain't that a dramatic title or what? There was a gritty biker-themed television show named THE LAST CHAPTER in Canada, starring Mr. Gritty-Sex-Appeal himself Roy Dupuis. There won't be any spectacular gun fight or gangster compound explosion in this article, I promise. It's just that I finished with my first draft...well...almost finished. I have one chapter left to go. One last chapter and I will have written the first draft to a god-damned three hundred page novel. Yep, the same boy that was afraid of typing a twenty pages paper for school, four years ago has written three hundred pages of a story that more or less holds together.
It's nuts what goes through your head when you start seeing the finish line. I should be happy to see it, but there is no champaign, girls in bikini, not even a guy with a checkered flag to welcome me. The only thing that lies beyond the white line is another three hundred pages race. This time I will have a back pack with two fifty pounds dumbbells on my back: rewriting and editing. I'm not sure if it's normal that I feel this loathing and the urge to rewrite it all? I can now see why first drafts don't cut it anywhere. Unless you're James Joyce, Maurice Roche or some other "too-deep-to-understand" kind of writer. A first draft creates images. A series of portraits you use in order to put accurate words on your story. My only concern while writing it was to go from point A to point B without asking myself too much questions. I repressed a few urges to press "delete" during those eight months, but all in all I went to point B without taking to much damage.
Nonetheless, I managed to keep my optimist along the way. I have recently finished The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway and am now reading The Deer Park by Norman Mailer and both writers inspire me greatly at creating clearer portraits of my characters. I revere their patience and their attention to the human detail. Mailer is particularly good at making human nature stand-out at the heart of a luxuriant, distracting setting. The Deer Park came at the twilight of Hemingway's career so one fed off the other I guess.
Still, I have one chapter to go. In the past, I have been the one whining and saying: "Rare are the endings that can live up to their tales". Now that I'm in my writer-pants, I remember with great fondness the smart-ass that I was and how easy it could get to criticize the work of others. My take on endings is that they have to hit you hard. Harder than anything else in the story and reveal things that couldn't have been foreshadowed, while keeping in this narrow corridor of good taste. Taking the "Ah-Ha! Stupid-reader-you-didn't-see-me-coming-AT-ALL" is too easy. The reader know what's going to happen in the last chapter (or what might), but now is time to reveal the full scope of the intrigue and the deepest, inner motivations of characters, while keeping the tension as high as I can.
But an end has to be an end. No cliffhanger or uninspired psychotic drifting like the French postmodern have gotten us used to. It's exhilarating, the END! Then it's on to a good round of line-edit and re-writing. I expect to keep maybe half of what I wrote...*sigh*...any tips, encouragements, insults, cookies for the greater unknown ahead?
