The End is (nearly) in Sight by Jane Walters

If anyone else here is as old (or as lacking in discernment in viewing as me), you may remember a terrible Australian soap opera called Sons and Daughters. The acting was pretty amateur, though it fared better production-wise than its ratings rival The Young Doctors. There, the lighting guy was clearly a keen, eager-to-impress kind of chap, making sure he held the rig so close to the actors that it glared off their shiny foreheads and made their skin look not just white but positively iridescent.

Anyway, back to Sons and Daughters. After an interminably long run, time was finally called on the show and I – naturally – tuned into the last ever episode. Within the allotted thirty minutes, every single character had their story-line neatly tied up, every crisis was either averted or resolved, every relationship placed on solid ground. No question was left unanswered (except “why am I watching this drivel?”) and the half dozen loyal followers of the show could rest easy, knowing all was well. Implausibly, but definitely, well.

I’m on the last chapter of the novel I’m currently writing and it’s time for me to move everything on towards its natural conclusion. My previous daily prayer of “Unleash your words in me, O Lord” still applies, though the unleashing is more of a trickle than a gush. If this were a sewing-machine-made garment, I would be at the nit-picky hand-stitching stage. To continue the analogy, my thread keeps knotting and tangling and sometimes I can’t see to even thread the needle. It’s tempting to walk away, leave it for a while, but I want to learn how to negotiate these harder phases so I press on, tiptoeing through the process.

Sons and Daughters wanted to sew everything up, neat and tidy, no loose ends. My experience, though, is that life is rarely like that. (My own has been particularly unkempt these last few months.) If I want my work to be authentic and to both inform and reflect daily life, then I must shun the temptation to rush this final stage. The final thousand words will be those that make or break the previous ones.

What a burden it is sometimes to be a writer!

A verse springs to mind, somewhat out of context, “who, for the joy set before Him, endured the cross…”

Isn’t that why we put up with the stress and the mental fatigue and all the other frustrations? Because of the joy of finishing?

Next month, I hope to be able to report that joy is, indeed, abounding!

 

 Jane Walters leads 2 ACW groups in Norfolk and leads creative writing retreats further afield. She is signed to Intersaga Literary Agency.