Fifteen weeks after the first day of the second new year

No, Author is not going all philosophical on you. This isn’t a post about how the end is not really the end, but the beginning of something new, nor about how failures can teach you and send you on a new and better path, or how you don’t need to be sad about finishing the book you’re working on because there will be a new one after that, or whatever other connections might have popped into your mind when you read the title.

This post is actually very practical. You know how in the movies you see the author reaching the end of the book, and then typing—usually it’s on a good old typewriter—those famous two words, The End? You know, he or she presses enter, starts a new line, and in that new line, right there in the middle, types it: The End. Well, no such thing. Not the end, not even close. When you finish writing your story, when you’ve reached the last chapter, the last page, the last line, the very last word, you don’t write The End. You don’t think about The End. What you do is scroll all the way back up to the top of your file, and go again over every word you’ve written, to make sure you got the story the way you want it to be. You know, plot, characters, locations. You go through everything, until you reach that last page again, the last line, the last word. Which just might be a different word now, with the revisions you’ve made.

So, now The End? No, not yet. All you have is still just a draft. And so back up you go, all the way to the title, and format the entire document to a comfortable font and organized layout, to make it easily readable. And then you send it to an editor. And when the editor sends it back to you, all marked red and with countless comments and questions in it, you grab a cup of good, strong cup of coffee or tea, or both, sit in front of it and go through it all again from the top. Slowly, with care, noting every marking, every comment, every question about any inconsistency, discontinuity or unclarity. If there’s anything to rethink, you rethink it. If there’s anything to revise, you revise it.

By the time you finish that part of it you probably won’t even recognize that place where The End used to be, it will be different. The entire document will be different and might feel a bit like it’s made of patches and fixes and changes that haven’t been fully assimilated in all the parts of the story. But that’s okay, because you’re going back again, all the way to the top. You need to go over the entire thing again, go over the story and make it whole after all the changes you’ve made.

And that’s not the last time you will be going over your story. You will be going from top to bottom, from the title to that last word, again and again, revising it as many times as necessary, until you decide it’s ready, until you know it’s ready, until you’re ready for it to be ready. You will work on its content, and then you will work on formatting it for publication, and while you do the formatting you will find yourself making more changes to the content, and, frankly, it will be a while before you can stop, lean back, breath out deeply and say to yourself, that’s it.

The fact is that that place where you think it says The End is only the beginning. It will be months before you can tell yourself your work on that particular story is done. And if you want to do things right, that’s exactly the way it should be. And you know what, by the time you do reach the end, you’ll be worn out, your mind will feel like you’ve run over it with a semitrailer a couple dozen times. But you won’t need to write The End anymore. You simply won’t have the need for the movie moment. You will feel it. You will know by heart every hidden corner of your story, you will know it’s done, you will know you are ready for it to be published. What you will feel will be so much more than reaching the end of your draft the first time and writing those famous two words.

This week’s tip? Just get there. It’s worth it. Whatever you go through on the way, whatever obstacles or delays or self-doubts you encounter on the way, whatever amount of work and effort you’ll feel you’ve put in, when you reach the real, true The End, it’ll be worth it.