Writing to The End

A great piece of advice I was once given by a guest-lecturer in a book-writing workshop course was to write to the end, meaning, write to the end of the first draft before you mess with it too much.  But at the time, like with all great advice, I never realized how good it was.


Applying the short story process to the longer works.

Before I started writing longer pieces, I wrote short stories, and with those, it was easy to write to the end.  It was so easy, in fact, that I never thought about it or realized that's what I did.  I always wrote my first drafts in a few sittings -- usually one.  I would never stop a few pages in to tighten up a metaphor or iron out some grammar; and I would never start in the middle, then write the end, and write the beginning after that.

But when I started trying my hand at longer pieces, I didn't strive to write to the end, since I had never had to think about that part of my writing process.  I floundered around for a while, trying to write long pieces the way I thought I wrote short pieces: write a character until I know him well enough to watch and record what he would do in a given situation.  

That was not a structured enough approach to make a novel-length piece work (for me), and I ended up writing very long character studies which added up to very little in the way of a long piece.  This was around the time I received the advice to write to the end -- but at the time, I didn't heed it.  (It's damn hard trying to give artists advice about their process, isn't it?  I think it's because you can't give anyone experience, and experience is the only way to realize what works and what doesn't.)


Putting away childish things.

When I started writing my current novel, the process was new from its inception.  I knew the entire story before I sat down to write it, and since I started, I have been going full-speed ahead toward the end, in order.  

Perspective

It has been tempting to go back and rewrite passages to strengthen their language or their resonance with the rest of the piece, and some of my friends like K Bookman write this way.  But I can't do that because I feel like if I can't see the a complete draft, I can't see how a change to any one part would change the rest of it.  I keep a notebook of ides for changes I would make to the draft if I were allowing myself to work that way.  When I get to the end, I will sort them out.

Pacing

With a complete draft, I will have a better idea of how important each scene is in terms of pacing, and how long I should spend on any part of the story.  While writing the first draft, I write everything I can think of for each part so that in there somewhere might be something useful.  But the amount of stuff I could think to write is hardly a good measure of how the book should be paced.

Percolation

Thinking before you act is usually well-advised, anyway.  So not making changes to the draft until you get to the end gives you more time to think about your ideas.  You will probably keep thinking of changes to make to CHAPTER ONE throughout the entire writing of the book.  The longer you sit on it, the more ideas will percolate between the ears.  When you get to the end, I think, you're in a much better place to make decisions.


(I promise the alliterative "Ps" were not on purpose.)

PS: Awareness.


The point of this post and this blog is that awareness is key to improving your process, even if you don't work at all like me -- even if you're not a writer at all.  I didn't notice that writing to the end was an important part of my short story writing success, until I had to consciously re-introduce that way of writing into my approach to longer works.  I can't say I wasted time, because there's no way to skip this whole "experience" stuff.  But I am convinced that raising your awareness and sensitivity to what you're actually doing will always give you the most edge in your craft.