The Terror of Finished
It was a marvelous residency, but I’ll talk about that in another post. Right now I’m thinking about my thesis novel. My thesis is in the hands of my second reader. Its fate is outside my control, and will be until he has read it and given his official feedback.
“So, Stefon Mears, you just finished a seventy-six thousand word manuscript! What are you going to do next?”
If you were expecting an answer involving theme parks, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. I did take a little time to celebrate the fact that I had completed my longest, most comprehensive work to date. After all, it took a year and about four full revisions to reach that stage. I’d prefer not to count the actual hours that went into it.
After enjoying the feeling of success, I began the work toward seeing it published – researching agents, working on my proposal package and so forth. You can spend a lot of time on these things. Writing and tweaking a synopsis to get it just right, digging around the social networks for just a little more detail about an agent you’re considering, browsing through bookstores in person and online to find “comparables” (novels to which the marketing heads can compare your manuscript), and other similar activities.
All of those things are important if you want to draw the interest of an agent, a publisher or both. In fact, they’re important enough that you can overlook the greatest problem with them: you aren’t writing.
After you’ve spent a year working on a story, it’s comfortable. You know it backward and forward. You know the characters so well you don’t want to leave them. It’s so much easier to find excuses to stay with that story instead of doing what’s really scary: starting another.
After all, starting another novel means coming up with new characters, plots, settings and figuring out how you’re going to string together another fifty thousand words or more and turn them into a good, coherent story. It’s enough to make you want to crawl back under the covers and think some more about the novel you just finished.
But you have to move on, if you want to become a novelist and not a flash in the pan.
So how do you drag yourself out from under the covers and back to your keyboard where you belong? The same way you got there in the first place: enthusiasm. You have to play with ideas until you find one that calls to you, that intrigues you until you have to write it. You have no choice. The idea demands to be written.
Personally I find that it helps to decide on the next novel before finishing the one in progress. I know that I had an easier time getting through the final phases of revision on my thesis novel becauseI knew I had another story clamoring for my attention.
Either way, the next thing you know you’re drafting again, and all is right with the world.
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Submissions update: I have not submitted anything since my last post, but I’m going to send my manuscript to an agent by Monday.
