The End.

I’ve written those words again.  I’ve unwound the thread of my story all the way to its finish.  The next thing is to look it over to see what more needs doing, and what needs doing differently.

It’s a mental adjustment.  I’ve been living with this thing for weeks, working away at the level of paragraphs and sentences.  Now I have to try to put myself into the mind of a reader who is coming to it for the first time.  I imagine this is like the moment when a painter makes the last tiny stroke on their canvas with their finest brush, and then steps back to look.

In fact, if the painter is sensible, maybe they do more than just step back.  They walk out of the room, make a cup of coffee, dig the potato patch or something and only then do they walk back in and look at it.  That’s because they need to see it as a whole, without focusing immediately on that bit there that they’ve always known isn’t quite right.

Writers cannot read a whole manuscript just by looking at it.  We have to work our way through it from the beginning.  It’s very, very easy to get distracted and start thinking that the sentence right under our eyeball would be so much better if only we took out the comma, or something.  But we have to ignore that sort of thing at this stage.  However futile it might be, we are trying to get that overview.

One tip that might be useful is to print the thing out.  Words are much harder to fiddle with once they’re on paper.  I try not to print off more than I have to, because I do want there to be a planet for my children to enjoy (and also because printer ink costs more than liquid gold,) but there are times when you just have to sacrifice everything for the book.

Another tip is to let time elapse.  This is one case where tomorrow really will be better than today, and next week will be better still. Go off and do some necessary research. Take a holiday. Do some more research. Give the mind space to disengage.

Then, one Monday morning, come back to it. Bring it up on the screen or put the printout on the table in front of you.  Frown. Start reading, that very familiar first page… (Pedants, that comma was deliberate.)

Hey! Is this really going be better than I thought it was?

Er…