"Finishing" a Novel

Picture this. You're sitting at your computer or your typewriter (SOMEBODY in the world must use a typewriter) and typing with anxious fingers. Then you do it, you type the final word. You have a finished novel, you wrote a BOOK. This is a cause for celebration. So you bask in your glory and imagine the moment your book becomes a New York Times bestseller.

But you're not finished.

It was your first draft, your first attempt at the story you're trying to create. It's far from finished, and when you look back on it a month later you know it.

So you rewrite it, and rewrite it again. And eventually you have a piece of work chiselled down to its finest parts. It's beautiful. But it's not finished. You haven't got an agent; you haven't got a guarantee it's worth it.

Then you get your agent, and they sell it to a publishing house. EUREKA! you say. NOW I'VE FINISHED! But, guess what? You're not finished. The most important part of a book is having people read it, and that conversation between reader and writer is what we writers yearn for. Your book isn't on the shelves yet. It's not done.

Okay, you say, as you look at your beautiful book on the beautiful bookstore shelves. NOW I'm done. You open the cover to a random page and you stare in horror. A TYPO??? IN MY BOOK???

The truth is, you will never be finished. You will always want to keep editing, revising, redoing. You've got a long way to go until the book is on the shelves, and even then there's more you could do to it. The point I'm trying to make is that you have to give yourself permission to suck. Your first draft IS going to suck; it's The Law. Don't beat yourself up about it.

You tell yourself that you're finished, that you've written your book. But for us, the real writers, well...we never stop writing.