On Finishing (Writing) a Novel

You are not obliged to read this. It’s largely an angsty piece of nonsense on how I feel having finished the first draft of my seventh novel, all 519 handwritten pages of it. 

Truman Capote once said, “Finishing a book is just like you took a child in the back yard and shot it.” Whenever I use this quote to describe my post-novel writing feelings to friends/strangers/family/et al, there’s usually a look of shock and even some amount of disgust. Most people don’t realize it’s in their reaction, but I see it. And it’s entirely fitting: shooting a child (to my imagination) would be a horrific, unnerving, and appalling thing to do. Especially if it’s one’s own child. 

But if my imagination serves me, and for the last 15 years it has done so quite unfailingly, finishing a novel is a lot of those feelings, plus many more. Looking back on all the work I’ve done as someone who puts words on paper (both before I considered myself a writer and after), this visceral reaction towards bringing a novel to completion has been constant throughout the years. To write the last words of the last sentence on the last page, only to step away and wonder “Where on earth has my heart gone? And why do I feel like I can’t breathe but need to vomit at the same time? And why is it so quiet?” 

The last time I finished the first draft of a novel, I was 16 years old, stayed up until 3:00 in the morning writing, and then crawled into bed crying my eyes out. I couldn’t think straight for weeks afterward. When people asked me how it felt to finish the first draft, I told them dainty things like “Oh, it’s nice to have a break,” or, “It’s nice, but I kind of miss it.” I didn’t just miss it. I’d worked on that first draft for nine solid months. When I started comparing my feelings to postpartum depression to my closest friends and family, they got the hint: I am in serious pain, and it’s because of this book, and I’m not even done with it yet. 

Have you ever had to say goodbye to something precious? Something so dear to your heart it bypassed your heart completely and belonged to your very soul? For me, writing a novel is a lot like that. And saying goodbye to something so dear to you that it actually fuses itself to your soul when you’re not looking is like cutting out a piece of yourself with a sword still hot from the forge. It’s like taking a child in the back yard and shooting it. Because even with the re-write process, and the revision process, and the editing process, and the re-editing process, and the re-re-writing process, the first draft is the time in which it is nothing but you and the world you’ve brought into being. The characters you’ve given voices to. 

I am a masochist to the extreme. I write WWII historical fiction, exclusively about the men who fought the war. And the characters I invent are not quiet, shy, or reserved in any way about who they are, and the world they live(d) in is as vivid to me as the present day. A friend recently asked (as many others before her have done) why. Why write about something so depressing if it depresses me? Why kill characters if it kills me? Why write about men if they frustrate me? And I told her simply: because it makes me feel alive. My boys have voices, and they are loud and obtrusive and have no qualms about talking to me and giving me their opinions. I listen, sometimes too closely. I listen to them because they are the pieces of my heart and mind and soul I didn’t know I was missing until their name wound up on a piece of blank paper. Felix Carpren. Sebastian Kertz. Jürgen Kertz. Dolan Moore…my boys. 

This last novel (my seventh), the first draft took me one year, five months, and two days to complete. I stayed up until 2:45 in the morning on a school night writing, and when I finished, I realized I couldn’t cry. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I was physically incapable of doing so. I sat there on my bed looking at the number on the top of the final page - 519, 519, 519 - and wondered why. Why couldn’t I cry? Why couldn’t I close the notebook? Why couldn’t I put the pen down? And when had the world gone so quiet? Whereas the last novel I wrote felt torn from me like a baby from my arms, this time was like having a piece of my soul cut out by something hot and unforgiving.

You handwrite the lives of three men for 519 pages and your daily life is filled with the sound of their voices, bickering amongst themselves, and then all at once, with a final pen stroke, it’s silent. Like a big black blanket has been thrown over your mind and an iron cage a size too small clapped shut around your heart. I feel like I haven’t breathed in a week. And I still haven’t cried. Because I’m so deep in this depression (and that’s what it is) that the numbness has spread from my outer limbs to the very base of my sympathetic nervous system. And I feel like if I cry, another part of me will break away. But it’s so quiet inside my head - it hasn’t been this quiet in almost a year and a half. And it’s terrifying. 

There is still so much work to do. Still so much writing and re-writing that has to be done. I have to go back into this world and bring these characters back into my life and uncover more of their story, more of their world, more more more…but right now, I’ve looked at these three notebooks lying beside my bed in Paris and wondered how on earth I ever got to this point, and how I will ever be able to function without them to hold on to. Right now, there’s a great empty nothingness before my feet. For a year and a half, they had me. It was me, them - my boys - a pen and 519 pages. I’m not used to nothing. 

I need the child to come back to life. But I’ve already fired the gun, and I don’t know where the aid kit is…