Now that we’re getting to the end of my novel in book club, I have noticed a distinct shift in the attitudes and comments – see my blog from earlier this week for those. However, what I’ve noticed even more so, is that my attitude toward working on the book has changed. Lately I have found myself darn close to terrified when I sit down to work. There is something about working on the end that feels much heavier then working on the beginning or the middle. It’s almost like the first couple of pages are important, the end is critical and everything in between can be kind of mushy. I don’t truly believe that, but I’m starting to think that subconsciously I do!
It’s as if my brain decided I have leeway on the middle bits. If there’s a chapter that isn’t great, meh! Whatever, the next one will be better, and it’s all just driving to the end anyway. Therefore, the end has to be spectacular. Every word carefully chosen, every sentence constructed with precision, every paragraph modeled with meticulous care. It must be EPIC! Now I get that endings are important, but if the middle of the book sucks, no one is going to get to the epic ending.
Not to mention, I find it highly ironic – real ironic, not Alanis ironic – that my book takes place during the Civil War and I’ve built the end up to be huge. When in real life, the Civil War just kind of petered out as Grant wrapped his troops around Lee’s siege of Petersberg and squeezed them like a python. Lee and Grant had no breathtaking victories or sweeping campaigns in 1865. They were all camped out in Virginia. Grant recognized that his greatest resource was men, and he kept throwing more and more men at Lee, until Lee had too few to continue. The end of this war lacked the dramatics that say WWII had.
Yet subconsciously I think that I have built the end of my book up as if it were a Hiroshima or a Nagasaki. Not a siege that slowly collapsed like a flan. Not that I want the end of my book to slowly collapse, but I’m trying to get my head space somewhere in the middle. A nice healthy space that is not sad deflation, but also not atomic bomb. So far, I am not succeeding at all and find that I am highly intimidated by my rewrites. Therefore, I have come up with a new mantra – “Trust the outline, and focus on the chapter, not the end.” We’ll see how it works.
Do other people blow the importance of the end of something out of proportion too, or is that just me?