I woke up this morning and realized I’m done with the novel. It came like a revelation: I’m done!

That is, a good draft is done. There is more work to do. But this is a milestone worth celebrating. And it came to me as if from a dream, on the last day of the year.

To be honest, I really wanted to create a beautiful, brilliant, polished, publishable draft of a complex and demanding novel by the deadline of Jan. 10, 2017. I really wanted to be the solitary artistic hero who creates masterful works of genius in complete isolation, who emerges from hermetic solitude with a gleaming perfect masterpiece.

That was my wish. At times, I believed I could do it. I knew, however, that such wishes are not always realistic. They are, in fact, one reason I created Finishing School in the first place.

As Jan. 10, 2017, approached, I saw that if I rushed, I might be able to solve the structural problems and make the right decisions. But many of those decisions require real thought and reflection. I was concerned that if I rushed it, I might make changes I later regret. I needed more time. And I needed an outside opinion.

Now I know. Indeed, the draft is finished. It’s a good draft. But it’s not ready for publication yet.

So my next step is to find the right independent editor. I have identified a few whom I will contact privately and I will look around a little more.

I know what questions to ask. I know what to do next. I’m eager, actually, to put certain fascinating and demanding structural questions in someone else’s hands for a while.

So … I’ll keep you informed about Famous Actress Disappears.

Meanwhile, and more to the point: Happy New Year! Buon Anno!

I have to focus on what is in front of me.

I get lost in the intricacy of the structure. I have to remember that at any given moment, the reader is in the present, reading the text, and if the text is engaging, if there is energy there, that is the crucial thing. The totality of the novel experience, the ultimate outcome, is the sum total of all these moments.

Meanwhile, the reader and I must each have some faith. I must have some faith in the reader, that the reader is attentive and generous. The reader must trust the experience of the prose and by extension must trust me, the teller, that I’m not a total jerk, that I’m not being arbitrary, that I have a plan.

In order to move forward with the writing day by day, I have to have faith that if each scene is worth reading then the work as a whole will hang together even if, at times, I lose sight of every detail and every twist, every nuance and heartbreak, every betrayal and victory, every back story and every motive …

I realized that I had three novels joined like Siamese triplets and had to begin the awful work of snipping, disentangling, hoping each one would eventually breathe on its own.

I kept looking for ways to make them work as one. Only abject failure after long labor could persuade me how impossible was the task.  I so wanted it to be possible that I tried and tried to make the material work. Again and again I saw that it would only be a murderous, insulting, hideous journey for readers, and they might well hate me for it, as it would feel as though I had ruined three perfectly good novels trying to knit them into one.

I love each of them. The first, Famous Actress Disappears, which I am currently finishing, is the most accessible and fun. I have merely entertained myself in the way I imagine others would want to be entertained–with a mordant wit, darkly satisfying, and snappy dialog part Chandler, part Shaw, part my own dark-night self-murmurings. I pray it is well-received but it is a vicious world out there. What I consider fun others may see as self-conscious, pandering, faux-ribald showmanship, boring and self-involved.

The second novel is a whole dark jungle redneck saga and the heart of the three, called Burning the Rain Girl; at its heart lies the fulcrum of reality and fiction.

The third, which might be called How Lives Intersect in Desperation and in Grace, is a long meditation on the two fictions that precede it and the nature of this thing we take for reality. It might end up more as a novella.

Also, not to be disregarded: There are perhaps 60,000 words of the protagonist’s therapy sessions that may form the basis for a fourth novel. That’s some favorite stuff that I love that I just cannot really make work in the current format. Sheesh. The things you learn when you commit.

I don’t do well under pressure, creatively speaking. External rewards are known to sometimes impede rather than inspire creativity. I need to remember that as I struggle to reach completion on this novel by January 10. I don’t want to do it. It is hard work and requires me to evaluate my own work carefully and make hard choices and think in an organized way and remain somewhat distanced from the heart of it, the voices I love, the textures, the word-pictures, all the delicious stuff that I love. And this is not easy. Imagining it being evaluated by agents, editors and then by the public fills me with dread. It makes me want to hide. I do not comfort myself with fantasies of receiving awards and accolades. In fact, such fantasies do not appeal to me; were they to occur, I do not know that they would make me feel good. What makes me feel good is the idea that I will be able to continue to do this work at my own pace and in my own way. So this current situation, where I am not working at my pace and in my own way, is not really great.

So I have had to take some of the pressure off and admit that it is not the end of the world if I do not finish by January 10. I may not be capable of finishing by January 10. Will that make me a liar, as I have claimed, publicly, that I will be done? No, it will only make me an optimist. An optimist whose claims are occasionally overly optimistic.

The more troubling fear I have is that this temporary experience will become permanent, that this momentary feeling of losing the love of it, losing the life-giving involvement in the production, the juicy part of it, that this will cause me to lose interest in the work itself. Permanently. And that could make me not finish.

If this sounds bleak, it is because over a week has passed without significant progress. I got to a point where I saw how it needs to fit together, and then I blanched at the sheer amount of drudge work my insight requires. Plus I had many distractions. I am, after all, living in Italy, in an apartment, and trying to move into a house, and at the same time doing a lot of other things … like this blog for instance.

This is the stuff we work through in Finishing School. All I really need to do, today, is set aside a couple of hours to make some progress on the novel. All I really need to do, today, is keep moving forward. I may feel panicked, hopeless, fearful, angry, tired, disillusioned, restless, uninterested. But all I really have to do is schedule a couple of hours to work and get to it.

So that’s what I’m doing now. Post this thing, tweet my check-in, spend a couple of hours mucking around in there, trying to move the rock forward a few inches.

Staying at it, persevering, finishing, overcoming obstacles, sitting in the chair alone in a room, writing chapter by chapter, problem-solving, concentrating … if you ask me, these are unnatural acts. Especially if you know people are outside having fun, and you’re inside, editing, revising, counting words, solving plot problems, flouting or observing genre conventions as you see fit, you, the lord of all words, this is all deeply unnatural and strange.

So why worry when you don’t want to do it or you find yourself devising strategies of escape from writing? It’s quite natural not to want to do it. Especially if you have to do it alone. Writing in a newsroom is distracting but at least it is not isolating. You don’t feel like you’ve been abandoned. It is pointless to pretend that you’re going to enjoy this process, or that it is going to bring you health and happiness. It isn’t. It is going to annoy you and put you in a bad mood. Not to mention the effect on your personality and sociability of spending hours at a time controlling an imaginary world. This intoxication of omnipotence must be left at the writing table. But no. The intoxication persists; the delusion persists; you leave the table and encounter the world and everything in it defies your will, that will so willingly obeyed by the subjects of your fiction. It’s startling how resistant store clerks and wives are to your imperious will, especially when the phantoms of your prose have been bending in your wind for months and years.

When you emerge from your throne as the ruler of all your kingdoms, you really need to get a grip.

Pure devotion to process. No writers block. Letting words come without effort or expectation. The path to illumination, blissful serenity, the writer as contemplative sage perched by a bubbling brook, regarding consciousness like that brook, a gleaming stream inhabited by luminous beings in eternal transformation …

That’s a nice place to be as a writer. But! That’s not where I am right now. What I’m doing is the exact opposite of that. I am commenting on what I am doing as I am doing it and that is totally screwing up my free-flowing, egoless, blissful, serene writing process!

So why I am doing it? I am commenting on what I am doing as I am doing it because I want to make this phenomenon visible. I want to provide a window onto the process. I want to report on my own chaos and conflict.

I don’t suggest you do this. It isn’t all that pleasant. In fact, I might have to quit this experiment in order to actually just finish the novel.

This is not what we do in Finishing School. I have to make that clear. In Finishing School we listen attentively to each other; we discuss the gap between what we intend to do and what we end up doing; we describe the emotions that attend our struggles, the obstacles that spring up in our daily lives, how we get sidetracked by the bottomless, swirling vortex of social media. As we share our common struggles, we form a picture of what is normal in the struggle to create and live whole, authentic lives. That helps. That is healthy. When we come together in a Finishing School group, we take a break from the actual work. We aren’t simultaneously trying to do our work and talk about it. That would be madness.  What I am doing right now is sheer madness! I am trying to write about writing my novel as I am writing it.

So what happens when I do that? What you might expect: I leave the powerful, flowing inner world and go external, where I see myself from the outside, as others might see me, and I cringe. I become aware of myself as others might judge me; like a child becoming aware of his sinful self, I encounter shame. I think, How will they regard me? Will I be seen as an unenlightened, opportunistic, immature man, an old baby-boom-age holdover from a less-enlightened, pre-postmodern world? I encounter the assumptions and hopes behind this fear. I realize that I have secretly harbored a dream of being seen as brilliant, groundbreaking, a virtuoso, and I must confront this and not laugh at myself or deride myself but accept it, as the illusions of a human, a flawed man, a worker among workers. I must comfort myself, as I am such a fool, but a goodhearted fool, an innocent fool, for thinking myself in league with Conrad, Dickens, W.C. Fields, whoever. Chekhov, Faulkner, Dostoevsky, all hectoring avatars of brilliance beat their wings about my head in the dark. I am suddenly sunk in the muck of shame and fear and ego.

Then an idea surfaces: What if I were to persist in this observational exercise, but excise the ego component: Observe and report but from the inside; resist thoughts of how I will be regarded. For what is this “I” but the very ego construct that’s causing the problem? (When writing, when deep in the voices and the pictures, laying it out, making words, the “I” is hardly there at all.)

Oh, plus the practical, realistic concern about the sheer amount of work ahead, how much there still is to do, with less than a month remaining to do it.

A few days ago I thought I saw the whole novel fitting together perfectly! Then something snapped, and I hated myself and thought it was all hopeless! Then fell ill with a cough and cold.

I don’t know what to say. I am trying to find my way back to just doing the work. And then: Revelation: I know the one thing that’s different: I stopped emailing my creative buddy! I haven’t been doing the method! I’ve just been pretending. It doesn’t work unless you do it. It’s not transformational. It doesn’t heal you. It’s just a thing you have to do to get where you want to go. Like walking to the store. If you’ve walked to the store a thousand times, you still have to walk to the store if you want what’s in the store. Like the brook, it is never finished.

And so why do I keep quitting, if I know it works when I do it? That’s just how I am. It’s my nature. That’s what the method is for: As a corrective to my nature. As long as I do it. Hello, Creative Buddy, I’m working again! In a slight variation on classic Finishing School method, I used Twitter. Say Hi! Let’s all use Twitter to stay in touch!

One of the agonies of editing a long novel under tight deadline pressure is the fact that everything in the novel right now is malleable. Would that most of it were set in stone! Then I would not be tempted!

I could do without the mental torture of knowing that everything can be changed. I go in with the intent of writing one small scene and then find myself tinkering with a chapter title. Leave it alone! I tell myself. But it could be better. I’m not sure it’s right.

It takes real discipline. Had most of it already been typeset, I wouldn’t think about it. If even most of it were in clean paper manuscript form, like in the old days, if I had already paid a typist to produce clean copies, I would not think of touching it, for I have a practical side, I have worked in publishing and I know when to leave something alone. But this process, where everything is malleable, this is torture. I must train myself not to notice anything but the thing I came to fix, or the narrow area where I must insert something. I must not look right or left. I must not see the things that still seem undone. I have to move on. I cannot dawdle. I have a deadline. My mantra must be: “good enough.”

No need to go into the roots of this, either, although it looks like I’m going to anyway: I am a perfectionist, a meddler, an aesthete, I have strong opinions about everything. At times, this trait has been the death of me–that everything has to be just so. In collaborating, in a musical group, in performance, or with other writers, this aspect of myself is a hindrance. But at least, when working with others, I can consciously let go. I can say, OK, I go with you on this. But in writing the novel I am alone, with only myself to rebel against, with only myself as the tyrant, the ogre, the masterful overlord,  and so raw, unprotected, unarmed, with no illusions, I confront myself, my touchy, insular, controlling, meddling, indecisive, power-hungry, perfectionistic self. And I say good morning, touchy, perfectionistic self: Keep your hands to yourself. Wander in the museum of your own creation and do not touch the artifacts.