There she

is

Endings

I'm two thirds of the way through my second attempt at a book, which I'm feeling quite good about. I sent the first five chapters to a few people and had very strong reactions, but they'd had a lot of polishing. It's strange to read through the book - parts make me really elated and happy, other parts depress me so much I have to stop reading. It's going to take a lot of work to knock it into shape, but then it's a lot of work just to write the thing. The big thing this week was the ending. I'd written almost all of what I have so far without having anything in mind at all. Two thirds in and you should really be curving things home towards the ending I think, so on Monday I spent the night thinking, and came up with something. The something wasn't very good, but I told myself it was, it was just about how it was written. I mulled it over a day or two and then described it to my much better half, who was slightly drunk at the time. She screwed her face up and told me it wasn't very good at all. She then described the ending she thought it should have, and became grumpy when I told her I probably wouldn't use it.
So on my second writing night of the week, it was back to the drawing board. I sat in my spare room/ study and moved from chair to floor, from floor to bed and back to the chair, reading the endings of my favourite books, thinking about what made them great, tearing at my hair and trying to focus. The experience was miserable, until all of a sudden it happened. A true bolt of inspiration, it suddenly came to me. I scribbled down a load of notes and wrote some potential lines, fleshed the idea out and fell in love with it. The thing was, I'd had most of a bottle of wine by then, so i carefully put it all away and hoped it wouldn't be shit in the morning. It doesn't seem so. It's been filling my head for days now.
The point, or rather reason for this rambling is just that it was such an experience. The perfect writing moment really. A combination of quite coldly and detachedly knowing what I wanted to achieve, of borrowing to some extent from my favourites, of finding the ending that did justice to the rest of the book and said everything I wanted to say, and striking a note and an image good enough (I hope) to expand and fill my mind. I hope I have more moments like that.

The endings I love in other books, incidentally, are:

- glamorama: he’s punished by being replaced with a 'better' version of himself
- lunar park: the life he tried for collapses and he returns to form, numbs himself, and reveals that this incredible literary experiment and gripping ghost story have, all along, been a redemptive book about his dad.
- Sabbaths theatre: again he ends up where he started, amongst all the things he hates
- The man who walks: powerful, past meets present image, incredibly violent and striking
- Infinite jest – a sad, telling, luminescent episode from the main character's past
- The heritage – a very sad, painful scenario with another striking physical image

i hope mine might begin to stand up. Can't wait to get there now. Must. Not. Rush.