Finishing

It's always a bit tough when I'm not absorbed in something. I find that my typical response when I reach a finishing point, whether it's completing a draft of a novel, a major revision, final polish, or graduating, my next mood tends toward the depressed. I work hard, put in a ton of effort, and then there's such a strong anti-climax at the end. I've felt this when I did theatre and would direct a play: weeks were spent rehearsing, and then opening night arrived and I had nothing more to do with it. But probably the greatest example of this is with a long writing project. After all, at least when one graduates from school, there's a level of social understanding that something worthwhile has been accomplished (okay, maybe nobody thinks that about getting an MFA). But if I've spent two years working on a novel, and now I've finally completed the absolute polish, what has truly changed? I went from doing something by myself at my computer to not doing that. I'm not suggesting I want sympathy, I'm just tossing this out there as a sort of odd experience. For me although it's exciting to know I've done something, it's also a bit depressing.

A large factor in this anti-climax is due to how much I like writing. When I'm really caught up in it, it's absolutely the most fun thing to do. Even when it's more of a struggle, it's an exciting struggle, like trying to figure out a complex puzzle. Personally, I don't really get Sudoku, but I appreciate why other people would enjoy it because I like that aspect of creating a story where I have to be precise and get everything to work in the exact correct way or it won't hold together. So going from actively being absorbed in something I love to not having that in my life sends me into a bit of a funk for a while. So I find the best solution to this is to dig into the next thing.

Between finishing my first novel and beginning my second, I was busy with other things, so after the inital blues of not having my first novel constantly in my thoughts I noticed the absence of writing a bit less than I sometimes would. I packed up my life in Maine and traveled across the country, spent weeks visiting my family in California, including my then two year old nephew and newborn niece, and then I drove north to Alaska to begin an MFA program. These things worked as distractions fairly well. But Also during this time, I was thinking about the next book, which at the time I envisioned as a collection of inter-related short stories. And before I began working on the new novel as a novel, I had begun some of those stories and I tried to figure out how the others would work together. Then I also tried to do some other stories, hoping to compose something that I could publish in a literary journal, boost my resume and start getting a name for myself.

My experience in recent months has been a bit different. I finished my MFA with the novel as my thesis, but I knew I had more work to do with it. Whereas my first novel was a great learning experience, I have no plans to attempt to publish it, but this new one is different. It's a better book, and I felt that with a few more months work, I could get it to the polished stage it needs to be in order for somebody in the publishing world to be interested. So I was out of school, and decided to take a few months to work full time on the book without the distraction of a job or basic life responsibilities (A gigantic thanks to my parents for letting me stay at their cabin, which made this option possible). This worked amazingly well, and I think I probably managed to get more time in additional revisions than I could have if I spent another year working on it while also working full time. But this left the problem of having nothing else on my plate when I finished. The anti-climax came big because I had no other major distractions, and so I went from many hours a day spent on this novel to nothing. From the perspective of an outside observer I'm sure it doesn't seem that different. I was an unemployed guy who sat at a computer fiddling around, and now I spent less time at the computer. But for me, it's a tough transition to make. The driving force in my life is one day no longer there, and I have to figure out what to do with myself.

So the logical solution is, of course, to start something new. But, alas, that isn't always so easy. But since I see this post is getting a bit long, I'll let something new wait for next time.