Crossing The Finish Line

“All human happiness and misery take the form of action.” Aristotle

Years ago when I started writing my first novel , I had a full time job teaching in a school, and my two children were then in school, the oldest in elementary and the youngest in kindergarten. My daily routine demanded all of my waking hours, sometimes even more. I was up at five every morning, and after putting the kids to bed at night I had to mark papers and prepare lessons for my classes. So it would only be at around midnight, exhausted and bleary eyed, that I would sit at my desk for two hours more and work on my novel. I would force myself to write when:

“I’ve been utterly exhausted, when I’ve felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes… and somehow the activity of writing changed everything.” Joyce Carol Oates

The next day I would repeat the same routine with much the same determination as the day before. In the words of Martha Graham:

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action.”

While I was writing, I couldn’t talk about my book to anyone. Not because I was doing something special, which I thought I was at the time, but because the slightest comment, like ‘when will we see it’ or ‘what is it about’ or ‘you think you’ll be published’ would have interrupted the flow and would have destroyed the little confidence that I had as a beginning writer. I was happy and nothing else mattered to me. I felt at peace with myself even when I thought that my writing was worthless. I was under the illusion that I was the only one who could write what I was writing and that gave me great pleasure. In the words of Marguerite Duras:

“When I was writing in the house, everything wrote. Writing was everywhere. And sometimes when I saw friends, I hardly recognized them. And strangest of all is that I thought nothing of it.”

I lived in my dream world and worked hard sleeping four, sometimes only three, hours a day as if I was running in a marathon, writing tirelessly whenever I had the chance. As Raymond Obstfeld writes:

“The true test of whether you’re a real novelist isn’t that you’re working on a book. It’s that you finished one.”

The moment I wrote The END on the last page of my manuscript I felt a pang in my heart. It felt like something close and dear to me had ended and yet at the same time I was happy. I never expected to feel this way. I felt lost and cranky. And when one of my colleagues made the observation, “I don’t know what happened to you, but the spark has gone out of your eyes,” I didn’t have the guts to tell her that yeah I finished writing my book that’s what happened. Because in the words of Raymond Obstfeld:

“Novel writing is a marathon of endurance and discipline. And heart. Yet, crossing that finish line that says The End is like no other feeling in the world.”

ChK

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