This is the first Wednesday of the month, so it’s time for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group!
Ending a novel can be difficult. I don’t mean difficult to write (although they can be that, as well), but rather that there is a certain anxiety that comes with reaching the end of a novel that sometimes makes me want to drag out the last few scenes of a book just so I won’t get there quite so soon. I never get this feeling with shorter fiction.
It’s not the sadness of a project coming to an end, because finishing a first draft isn’t anywhere near the end of working on a novel. There’s still rewriting and editing and more rewriting to be done, not to mention all of the work that goes into publishing a book if that’s where I want to take it. But there’s still an almost lonely feeling about coming to the end of a first draft and switching from wild creative mode into a more sedate and critical rewriting mode.
Which is all a very long-winded way of saying I’m probably less than two thousand words from the end of my nearly 100k WIP, and I keep dragging my feet about finishing it. I’ve been bribing myself to write with coffee and lemon cream pie and reading other people’s stories, but it’s still slow going, and I still can’t quite shake the mounting uneasiness as I draw ever closer to “The End.”
How do you approach writing endings? What are your strategies for trudging through the parts of your stories you’re not entirely ready to finish writing?
Rhosyn Goodfellow 