Robert_Hart
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The final full stop is not the end…
🕑 Added 2020-05-04 00:46:56 +0000 UTC
This week has been strange in a number of ways. Through my Eyes. Again. is assuredly not my first attempt at writing a novel (that was at age ten), but it is the first time I have finished one, which is quite special, whatever the merits or otherwise of the object itself.
Now, you might be thinking that finishing is a function of having vast expanses of time as a result of the Covid-19 lockdown, but that is not the case: in real life, I am in my eleventh year as a senior Maths/Physics teacher, currently grappling with the vicissitudes of remote learning. I have been up to my eyeballs (and beyond) re-jigging learning materials and using the Internet to try and help my students learn the material and provide them with meaningful feedback, whilst we cope with their flaky internet connections, unreliable computers and understandable engagement lapses – all conducted from my 160-year-old family heirloom dining table, whilst fending off two affectionate ginger cats that want to be part of things. (I have introduced them to my students as my teaching assistants.)
So, writing time during these last few weeks has been in short supply. The end of TMEA has been in sight for a couple of months but getting there took me longer than I had expected for a couple of reasons that have nothing to do with the pandemic.
First, there were scenes that I had not expected that demanded to be included – and from that you can understand that my initial planning of TMEA was, to be polite, rudimentary. So as opposed to ending in chapter eighteen, the story ballooned to nineteen chapters. Indeed, at times, it felt that the end was receding as fast as I wrote.
The other problem was which of the three or four … or five … endings was going to make the final cut. I had started TMEA with a beginning scene and an ending scene and a great deal of fog to walk through to get there. As Willi, Col, Lili and Mutti Frida evolved through writing, different potential endings sprouted along the far horizon, weeds trying to smother the ending I was trying to nurture and reach. Ultimately, the ending that has survived is one that is a close genetic descendent of that originally foreseen. But some of the others were…different (I do not want to provide any hints/spoilers).
Interestingly, I have discovered that the final full stop is not the end of the writing process. TMEA exists as nineteen separate Word files and these need to be combined to produce epub and pdf versions and so I started exploring a variety of ways of doing that, which lead me to a realisation that I needed to sweep through those nineteen files, cleaning them up – mostly grammar and spelling stuff, but also imposing a standard way of including the several non-English languages in the story. This also meant deciding which ones required a translation and which ones did not; these are difficult choices that I have probably got wrong in places. Where I have not provided a translation, I think what is being said is obvious from the context, but since I know what is being said, that decision is problematical. Along the way, inevitably, I have made small tweaks in the text – nothing that changes the story, but hopefully these are stylistic improvements.
Whilst doing this, I realised there was a risk of endless tinkering, so I asked my daughter how she decides when a book is ‘done’ – her response was “When you get sick of looking at it and evict it from your life.” I am not at that stage yet, but perhaps soon…I have five more chapters to sweep though and then thread together.
I hope you enjoy Through my Eyes. Again. – if you do, I would love to hear from you why that is so and if you do not, thoughtful criticism is also very welcome as we grow through examining our mistakes not our successes.
You can comment here or at my discord https://discord.gg/7pVvRFF
