Finishing the first draft is disconcerting.
For a hundred or so pages, you’ve been picking your way through the woods. Dropping breadcrumbs, fleeing bears, getting lost and retracing your steps. Realising that every side of the tree is mossy, and none of them are a reliable guide to North. Trying to find another way across the damn river. Staring down the precipitous bluff of the page 60s across to where you think page 75 or thereabouts should be, convinced that there’s no way there from here.
For some writers, it helps to bring a map (this time I did, usually I don’t). But often you look at the map… and the terrain… and they bear no resemblance to each other.
And even if they did? Are you standing in the thick woods near this hill with the old Roman fort? Or the thick woods near that hill, with the unexploded ordnance from the nearby military base?
One of these goes ‘boom’.
But sooner or later, muddy and with a sprained ankle, you may notice that the woods are thinning out.
Even so, the edge of the woods arrives suddenly.
There you are. On the other side. Staring at an empty field, or a four-lane highway. Because you finally got to wherever this is – and the imaginary people you traveled here with are going on to places you can’t see.
I generally have a day or so where I just don’t know what to do with myself. It should be celebratory, but more often it’s just weird.
The thing’s done. It exists. There’s a way through the woods. It goes somewhere, albeit maybe not where you had in mind.
It’s probably not the right way through the woods.
There’s a good chance anyone scrambling down that bluff will break an ankle. You’re pretty sure you spent a good three days walking around in a circle. You have a hunch that where you turned right, if you’d turned left instead, you’d have found a waterfall.
The right place for the rustic warning to beware of the bear is not *just* outside its lair.
So you’ll open up side trails and cut steps into the bluff. You’ll put in signposts and noticeboards to helpfully identify the flora and fauna. You’ll make a detour around the place where the landslide almost buried you alive.
And gradually the path will smooth down from your traipsing back and forth, until some day, walking through these woods, you’ll catch yourself thinking ‘Hasn’t there always been a path here?’
WORDS AND THE SPACES BETWEEN THEM 