Finish it!

There was a letter in a writing magazine I picked up from Puzzled, UK, asking for advice.  Puzzled is a member of a writing class and has written the first three chapters of a novel.  So far so good.  Puzzled’s tutor thinks it has potential.  Even better.  But – and this is where Puzzled needs advice – he doesn’t want to write any more in case he’s going in the wrong direction.  He wants to send it out to publishers to get advice (praise?) on how good it is and what direction the novel should go in.

*Sigh*

Poor guy.

Don’t do it; just don’t do it.

One has ordinary feelings of human pity, after all.

Look, it’s not easy writing novels, not even bad ones.  There’s a lot of typing for a start and times when, in the throes of Literature, you could have your feet up in front of Top Gear, walking the dog, catching up with your jet-setting celebrity lifestyle, drinking cocoa or counting how many matchsticks it will take to complete your model of Nelson’s Victory.  Any of these activities can be seen as preferable to stewing away in front of a computer screen.  Oh, I’d include cleaning the cat-tray and knocking nails into walls with my forehead along with those.

A partly-finished book is just that; unfinished. It’s absolutely impossible to tell if it’s any good unless you have the finished article.  If Puzzled could stop thinking of himself as a writer and think of himself as a reader, then he’d answer his own question.

After all, how many books have you bought, Dear Reader, (to use a charming, old fashioned phrase) where the end’s missing?  (Not counting the tatty paperback from outside the charity shop!) It’s not just books, either. If, for instance, we all flocked to see Indiana Jones and The Crystal Skull and it stopped just as Indy approached the Hidden Temple because the writer couldn’t think what happened next, then there’d be tart, disgruntled comments and then some.

You see, despite some evidence to the contrary, editors and agents are human beings.  I’m not kidding.  Yes, I know certain of the tribe wear barbed-wire vests, breath fire and sacrifice their young under the full moon (we’ve all got faults) but honest to God, they’re human. They like to know how a story ends.  And if the author doesn’t know how the story ends – well, who does?  And why should they care?  And if the novel has skidded off in the wrong direction?  Well, it’s up to the author to fix it.  And what’s the wrong direction anyhow?

Besides that, it’s only after finishing a book that you, the writer, gets to look at it as a whole.  Is that the best place to start?  Should I move the passage about the exploding nasal-hair tweezers to Chapter Four?  Do I really need to include all that information about the home-life of Nabopolassar and the Neo-Babylonian Empire in the thrilling chase scene in Chapter Ten and should I make Michael Finnegan a de-frocked priest with the best collection of cheese-lables in South Dakota or a Belfast bus driver? And hasn’t the line It was all a dream been used before?

Finishing a book is only the start;  there’s stuff to do afterwards.

And what if, after having spent ages writing it and it gets rejected?  Well, I’m not sure how to break it to Puzzled, but there’s a chance this might happen.  Some years ago, I attended a workshop run by Simon Trewin, the well-known agent.  Mr Trewin, a highly-experienced professional, is open to new ideas and very encouraging to unpublished writers. But no one, he said, needs another novel.  Sad, isn’t it?  Particularly when that novel’s yours.  Yep.  And how many manuscripts does Mr Trewin get a year? Oh, about six thousand.  And how many does he take on?  About six.

So don’t put unnecessary obstacles in your way. There’s enough real ones to go round, believe you me. Writing can be fun, an enjoyable way of getting stuff off your chest, of recording events, of remembering what happened.  It can be all these things and many more.  But if you want other people to read it, please, Puzzled, finish it first.