Finished It's Finished

Finishing a new project, even when it’s just the first draft of a new project, is a sublimely satisfying moment. So many stories never quite happen, they never quite find their way to completion, that when one of them does--even more so when it feels solid and assured, like something that was always meant to be in the world but wasn’t until just this moment--there’s really not much else on earth that gives me quite the same rosy glow.

The new play I mentioned a while back was, from start to finish, absurdly easy to write. Now, granted: I’d had the idea for a while, wrote a five-page treatment months ago, but didn’t feel like I had the time so I just let it all sit in the back of my head. Where, apparently, it percolated. So that by the time I actually did sit down to start writing, I found that it was all already there--and much more marvelously alive and entertaining than what I’d described in the treatment.

Right up to the very last scene, it kept surprising me. I’d had a vague idea of the ending but it had never quite crystallized. But as soon as I turned my attention to it, suddenly a peripheral character who had mostly served mechanical functions within the play became the perfect solution to that last scene. And then, there it was. Finished, all finished.

And because writers are necessarily paranoid, I immediately made backup copies of the file. One on a thumb drive that I carry around with me; one on MobileMe where even if the house burns down with me inside it, the play will still survive. At a moment like this, of that sublime satisfaction of completion, the survival of the work feels a hell of a lot more important than the survival of me.

A little clean-up still to do—the main character’s name changed halfway through, so it has to be made consistent, and so forth. Then off it goes to friends for their opinions, while in the meantime I put it away and don’t look at it all for a while. Then, with fresh eyes and the considered opinions of others, I’ll do a second draft, after which comes the fun part: convincing the rest of the world to care half as much as I do.

But with this story? I really don’t think it’s gonna be too hard.

(Famous last words?)