No End

There is stopping, but there is no ending. I’m a householder. I have other things to do in my life than meditate. So, when my thirty minutes of zazen are over, most days, I get up from my cushion, but I’m not done. The next day, on my cushion again, I resume sitting. Practice is endless.

I have been finding something similar as I rewrite my first novel. When I finished the first draft, I followed the advice of my writing guru, Stephen King, and put it in a drawer. “Three months minimum,” he said. I had stopped, paused, but I wasn’t finished. I didn’t look at the draft for three months and when I did, I started cleaning up. I rewrote for a while, and then I stopped. I could have kept rewriting, but would anything more that I did in that moment make the book better? I shared my novel with my “first readers,” trusted friends, and the feedback was mostly encouraging. I screwed up my courage and took a shot at finding an agent. I reached out to twelve, a cover letter and the few pages that each asked for, fifty pages to one, only ten to the others. Only one bothered to write back, a polite no-thank-you.

Their non-reaction confirmed something my skeptical “first reader” had said. Although others plowed through to the end, one had disappointed me by quitting after only a couple of chapters. My agents’ non-reactions confirmed the bad news. My novel wasn’t grabbing them. I had my “hook,” but readers wouldn’t get to it until they were more than a hundred pages in. I thought about rewriting, moving the hook up front, but I was too discouraged. Who was I anyway to think that I could become a published novelist at my age?

The novel went back in the drawer, and I was uncertain if I’d ever look at it again. So much love and effort had gone into it, but I was done. After more than a year I took it out. I’m not sure why. I began rewriting, four versions of the first chapters, trying different points of view and different voices, trying to get the hook up front. In some versions, the narrative became a story within a story, but the telling became too complicated. I was drowning in quotes within quotes. I came back to my original viewpoint, shifted a bit the order of the telling, and settled down to rewriting. It took a while for the rewriting to gather momentum, but by the end I was loving it.. It was exciting. Although I’d cut a lot on the first rewrite, I was amazed at all the unnecessary words still there. I loved it as pages fell from chapters.

I stopped again because I’d done what I could at that moment. I gave it to Dee to read. It turned out that I wasn’t done. Her feedback pointed toward a whole new rewrite? Will I ever be done? Is there an end or is there only stopping?

Mostly, I write to be read, if only by one or two people. At some point, I have to stop and let others read what I’ve written. (I also write not to be read. I journal every day in such an illegible scrawl that I have trouble deciphering the text even within minutes). I will stop and share my rewrite. Will I revise again, or will I decide that my novel is ready to go out looking for an agent again? Will it get a nibble this time? Will a nibble lead to another round of revisions? Will the novel eventually get published? If not, will I come back to it? Do I instead go on to my second novel? My third? If it gets published, is it done then? Who knows? Didn’t Henry James revise all his novels years after their first publication?

The work is never finished. There is no end. Isn’t that the Zen wisdom? There’s only stopping, pausing, moving forward.