Students ask me one question a lot: “How do I know when my essay/memoir/novel is finished?”  And I always blithely quote someone who once said “A work of art is never finished, it’s abandoned.”  Or some version of that. Usually there’s the feeling you can do it better. Sometimes though you really do feel that it’s finished – you’ve had trusted friends (hopefully writers or at least avid book lovers) read it and give you feedback, you’ve rewritten and tried to deepen your characters and story, gone over and over the manuscript  to pare down to the necessary words and eliminated all frou frou, and finally you read it aloud to yourself to hear if the language worked. Then sometimes there does come this moment of thinking: yes, I’ve done my best. I’ve finished it.

Since this feeling can be fleeting, let me get it down in words right now cause I may not feel this way tomorrow. But as of today the novel-that-has-gone-on-forever is finished, now in shape to send to my agent (who has read a few other drafts of it and liked it, but this is the final draft she’ll read and hopefully send out).  Actually this time, this version, has only taken three years and three months to the day to finish. (I’ve written other posts on the novel-that-goes-on-forever under “Lies & Truth in Fiction” which includes the fact that there are now people half way through college who were born around the time I began this novel in a different version). If I’m very lucky someone will want to publish it, then I’ll get an editor who will give me notes for rewritng the whole thing. But right now, December 17^th, 2007, draft number 1,979 is finished.

And what I want you to know is that it’s finished in spite of the critic who sat on my shoulder  telling me it wasn’t good enough, in spite of the fact that once I got so depressed reading a draft of it that I was going to take the manuscript to the beach and throw the pages in the Pacific Ocean, and in spite of the fact that there were days and weeks of not having a clue to where this damn story was going.  I’m telling you all this depressing stuff in hopes that in some perverse way it’ll help you with your own writing. That you’ll grit your teeth and continue on with whatever it is you’re working on, that you won’t listen to your critic or throw your pages out.  And with the hope – even more important than publishing what you write – that you’ll get to the point where you know you finally wrote the story you’ve been hacking away at. For better or worse, you got it down on paper and finished it.