The Finish Line

Here we are, three days from the end of National Novel Writing Month.  For some who began the journey just over twenty-seven days ago, we've already crossed what the good folks at The Office of Letters and Light consider "The Finish Line": 50,000 words.  For others, that Finish Line is still out there in front of them somewhere, maybe in sight, maybe not.  Even for those who have crossed the 50,000 word barrier, they may not feel as if they've crossed their own personal Finish Line yet, either because there are still three days left to write, or because their story isn't finished yet.

Regardless of what camp you fall into -- or even the camp of "I'm Not Doing NaNoWriMo, So Jason, Would You Please Quit Talking About It and Talk About Something Else" -- any creative project we undertake has a Finish Line: an ending, a point at which we walk away and say we're done.  This is invariably true, whether we're sculpting, painting, drawing, writing, composing, singing, acting, or playing an instrument.

What's really interesting is how rarely the Finish Line is where we perceive it when we set out on the journey.  For those of us who set out to write a novel twenty-seven days ago, we knew what the Finish Line was: a 50,000 word novel, all nice and pretty, mostly free of typos and plot holes.

We'll call this Delusion Number One.

What we thought, what we perceived was the finish line, was really no more than a dream, a hope, a wish.  We looked out across the vast empty salt flats that were the canvas for our novel, and we plopped down a finish line Somewhere Out There.  Why did we do this?  Because we're human: if we don't have an ending -- even an imagined one -- we don't like to undertake the journey because we're scared of becoming lost in the Great Unknown.

And so, we headed out, firmly and confidently in the direction of our dream, our hope, our Finish Line ... our delusion.  Then, somewhere along the way, as we started to get the lay of the land, we realized something: that Finish Line up there wasn't right.  It either wasn't where we thought it was, or what we thought it was, or maybe even in the same direction as we thought it was.  Some of us even, at this point, came to realize that the Finish Line up ahead wasn't even as important as we had thought it was.

We experienced a brief moment of epiphany ... and then, because we're human, we smacked ourselves in the forehead with our palms and said, "Oh, well duh ... the Finish Line is really over there!"  We pointed off in another general direction -- maybe the same one, maybe different, maybe a different distance -- and set off again.

We'll call this Delusion Number Two (or, if you like, Delusion Number One-A).

We worked again, maybe for a day or two, or a week or more ... and then looked up and the Finish Line, again, wasn't what or where we thought it was.  It was probably around this point that we realized we could keep playing this game for the whole month ... and that we had better ways to spend our time.

Here's the truth about creating something: it is almost virtually impossible to know what, exactly, the Finish Line looks like until you reach it.  Sure, you may have a rough idea of what you want the Finish Line to be: the Finish Line is a finished handbell arrangement; the Finish Line is a rough draft of a novel; the Finish Line is a finished paining.  But the actual Finish Line you reach may not be at all what you thought or hoped it was going to be.  In fact, the Finish Line you reach may only be a stopping point, a place for your creation to rest before the next leg of its journey.

For me, writing my novel this month started out wonderfully: I had the whole thing outlined, I knew what needed to happen and when, I knew where it was going ... all I had to do was write it.  The Finish Line was straight ahead, an easy downhill jog.  On November 1, my Finish Line was to have a completed rough draft of a novel -- be it 50,000 words or 150,000 words -- but it wasn't long before I realized that just wasn't in the cards for this project.

I got started writing, and about the 10th of the month, I realized I was starting not to like my novel.  It was taking too long to get where I wanted it to, it was paced too slowly, and it was badly written. What I had thought was my Finish Line wasn't the right Finish Line, at least for this project.  So, as I sit here on the 28th of the month, my Finish Line is simply to see how far I can get the story before the month ends, at which point I'll set it aside -- probably unfinished -- and tackle it later under different circumstances.

Does that make me a failure?  I had a Finish Line and I didn't reach it.  Didn't I fail?

It's folly to judge a work of art based on where we thought it was going to go when we set out, because at that point, we had no idea where we were really going.  To paraphrase the Cheshire Cat, if you don't know where you're going, it doesn't really matter how you get there.  The same applies here.

Whatever your own current personal Finish Line -- whether for your NaNoWriMo novel or some other creative project -- I wish you the best of luck in reaching it.  As for me, I'm going to be feverishly typing, trying to get as far as I can before my thirty days run out.  I'll see you all over on December 1, when life will -- hopefully -- be much more sane.


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