On Finishing Something (during the Holidays)

Your new holiday mascot: Snorky the UPS Fish.

The Christmas season is, of course, a stressful time for everybody, but especially so in our household. My husband works for UPS. Not as a driver (or I'd never see him); he works in the warehouse, gassing up the trucks, parking them for loading, lifting and scanning boxes. He also serves as a shop steward, which is basically a public defender for hourly workers. Normally, he works an 11 p.m.-to-8 a.m. shift. From Black Friday until Christmas, it expands to an 8-to-8 shift. That's twelve hours a day, five days a week. Sometimes half a shift for a sixth day. The holiday schedule wasn't always quite so brutal, but nowadays, you know, Amazon. He never quite gets enough sleep, is perpetually tired (probably not great for his coronary artery disease), and invariably catches the seasonal holiday crud that goes around and hits you when you haven't slept in four weeks.

Symbolic representation of my plot.

On my end, I spend a lot of the holiday season feeling lonely and worried, and also sometimes wanting to go around hitting people with a shovel if they say one negative word about UPS workers (especially if it's along the lines of, "I ordered the gift on December 24 and it didn't come before Christmas! Why can't UPS compensate for my stupidity?!" I'm paraphrasing).

Adding to my slightly homicidal urge is the condition of being at the end of cutting down a 150,000-word project by a third, which, if you're too holiday-weary to do the math, means getting it under 100,000. Which, in turn, kind of means rewriting most of it. I sit at my MacBook at five in the morning (also my husband's lunch hour) tying up and polishing enough problematic plot bits, historical questions, and less-than-spectacular prose to fill a UPS warehouse.

But it also adds to my sense of isolation: few people out there seem to offer any actual advice on the end stage of the project. They purport to do it, but most of the advice deals with what to do after you've finished (Finish it . . . then get an agent!), or it sounds a lot like advice that could be applied at whatever stage. (Write an outline! Use index cards! Practice gratitude!) I'm not just talking about having a good ending to the story; I mean getting through the finishing touches, the editing that can drag on and on and on. And on. Whenever I've griped to someone about being blocked or stuck or just tired of the damned thing, the response is always the same: "Oh, just come back to that. Move on to something else."

I can't. There is literally nothing else for me to do.

Sorry, too busy completing the Great Western Railway to help you out, Miss!

Oh, sure, it was all breezy at the beginning. What British railway lines existed in 1844? Why does this once-lovable character suddenly not fit the plot? Why did every British metaphor I know have to originate in the World War II era, 100 years later than my story's setting? Pfft, who needs to know that?! I'll worry about that later. And then, quite a lot later, I'm worrying about it, and everyone tosses my own advice back at me. Worry about that later!

But . . . but it is later!

Oh, well, then, uh . . . practice gratitude?

(Reeeeaching for that shovel. . . . )

Anne Lamott, in her classic text Bird by Bird, likens this stage to tucking in an octopus, with tentacles constantly popping out and thrashing from under the bedclothes as you're trying to account for all these scattered, final bits. (Yes, that pretty much nails it.) But this metaphor appears in a very short, page-and-a-half chapter on how to know when you're finished.

Why so little guidance on this stage, versus how to get yourself started? I think it's because few people ever get here. And because all the instructions, suggestions, and war stories about finishing can't substitute for the actual slog of just doing it.

I admittedly don't have much to add, either. Except, if you've reached this point, you've already gotten further than most. That probably won't cheer you; in fact, you might be filled with an urge to quit. You'll think it's because of your creeping sense that the project isn't good, but it's more likely you've found out that beginnings aren't hard at all compared to endings. You now face not only the unanswered plot questions and nitpicky details but also the fear of looking at your carefully crafted, finished project and hating it . . . or, worse, loving it, and having someone else hate it.

But you might regret it if you don't finish. Sure, your instincts tell you that you should shy away from this and put the novel project down and go do something much more enjoyable, like gas up UPS trucks. But I advise you to run headlong into the discomfort you're feeling. Dr. Neil Fiore, in The Now Habit, likens this situation to hitting the wall when you're running a marathon: you're going to be sore either way, so you might as well finish because there will be a lot more payoff in the end.

Hullo! What am I doing in 1844? My hat hasn't been invented yet!

Also, discomfort probably means you're learning something. Not just about how to write and how to get to this rare point never reached by the majority of people who declare they are writing a novel, but also why nobody in 1844 wore bowler hats or said something was going "pear-shaped."

Seriously, I can't have anybody say "oh, bollocks, it's all gone pear-shaped"? What's the point, then?!

Oh, I could just say "gone to pot." There, that's one fire extinguished. And on to another issue, and another, one by one, until I look at the whole thing and say—in a different tone, this time—"There's literally nothing else to do."

I feel so much better, I might actually put the shovel away.