While writing my first draft of Wide Horizon, I felt unstoppable.  I worked into a groove, churning out chapter after chapter, and even after putting it down for nearly a year I picked back up where I left off as though nothing had happened.  There were a few bumps in the road, to be sure, but overall things were going beautifully.  Everything seemed to be turning out as I’d intended.

And then, after completing Part 2, I checked my word count.  For the first time.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, it is the richest of ironies that, through much of my first draft, I had feared that Wide Horizon would be too short.  I feared I wouldn’t be able to stretch my concept into a full-length novel.  I was sure of it, so I stretched things out.  I embellished my world-building, allowed myself to run of the pen, as it were.  Then, upon checking my word count, at once I went from worrying that my debut novel would be too short to fearing it would be too long.  Already, the word count stood at nearly 130,000 words.  And I’d only just completed Part 2.

So, prior to starting in on Part 3, I went back through all I’d written to that point and did some cutting.  A lot of cutting.  By the end of it, I’d removed over 6,000 words of text.  That helped, but again, I still had Part 3 to write.

As such, I cut a lot of corners in Part 3.  I condensed things, trying to compress the vital final passages into four cramped chapters.  In all honesty, though, the word count was only part of it.  By that point, Wide Horizon had been my work-in-progress for nearly three years, with nearly two of those years spent hard at work on it.  While I loved the story, to be sure, I must admit I’d grown tired of it.  I wanted to be done with it.  I wanted it to end.  To that end, I rushed through Part 3, and it’s safe to say that something written in a rush will read as such.

Thus, the only apt descriptor I can manage for Part 3 of my first draft is…well, disappointing.  After working tirelessly for years to produce a rich, engaging story, I drew everything hastily to a close over one miserable month.  The resulting mess was a mass of slapdash action scenes broken at intervals by canned dialogue, littered with plot holes and uncharacteristic spelling errors.  All of this led, mercilessly, to the major plots of the story reaching unsatisfying resolutions, the whole lot of it tied up primly with a hokey, overly-optimistic epilogue.  The finished product stood in stark contrast to the rest of the novel.  It was as though I’d led the reader on a long, scenic stroll, then pushed them off a cliff.

For my part, much to my discredit, I scarcely noticed.  For me, the end of Part 3 marked a significant milestone: I had written a novel.  An entire novel.  Set against that sense of accomplishment, it was hard to feel ashamed of what I’d created.  After all, I had done it.  The work of three years had at last ended in a novel, one I was deeply proud of.  So, I didn’t realize the gravity of what I had done in the penultimate chapters of my debut novel.  Not at first…

In time, of course, I grew more self-conscious.  My first revisions left me staring at the screen, scratching my head.  Yet, though I managed to correct the typos and a few odd grammatical mistakes, the more I stared at it, the harder it was to change it.  As with other lackluster passages of the story, I had grown accustomed to Part 3, and though I knew it could be better, the more I read it, the more convinced I was that it was good enough.

Once again, this is why every writer needs an editor.

Overall, my editor seemed to truly enjoy my novel.  She was largely complimentary, and indeed I found her feedback through the structural edit gratifying (in particular, she took a liking to a character I enjoyed, yet most of my beta readers had hardly seemed to notice).

And then she arrived, inexorably, at Part 3.

It bears noting that Lauren is not simply my editor; she is a friend, and indeed a close one.  Perhaps I would have felt differently had she been a veritable stranger in my employ, but I doubt it.  Either way, her feedback on Part 3 stood in stark contrast to what she’d had to say about the rest of Wide Horizon, much as the passage itself stood in contrast to the rest of my work.  I must admit, the ardor with which she shredded the final four chapters was, at first, more than slightly hurtful.  I often feel that, perhaps more so than most writers, I tend to be my own harshest critic.  To see someone else tear into my work was somewhat damaging.

The funny thing about criticism is that, once one takes a moment to push past the umbrage, one often finds there’s a point to it.  Much as was the case for my romantic subplot, those harsh words regarding Part 3 proved to be exactly what I needed to hear.  I was forced, at last, to admit that I hadn’t done it justice.  Amid insecurity regarding the word count and my rush to complete the first draft, I had neglected my original vision, and it showed.  At last, I was able to see Part 3 for what it truly was: a rough, halting, wholly unfulfilling conclusion to what had, to that point, be a terrific story.

It says something that, in revising Part 3, I found myself simply deleting vast tracts of chapters, completely rewriting pivotal scenes that had fallen flat.  The writing thus far has been arduous, even more so than I had anticipated.  However, as of tonight I am endlessly pleased to report that I am preparing to edit the final chapter.  And though I expect this chapter’s revision to be no less fraught than those preceding it, I should be able to push through it by the end of the day tomorrow.

At long last, the journey of the Wide Horizon is nearing its end.