The End

When Zadie Smith finished On Beauty she drank a bottle of wine and lay in her garden crying; Peter Carey says he's afraid at the end of every book that he’ll never have another idea. Six Australian writers tell how they feel about reaching The End.

MALCOLM KNOX

How do you know when a book is finished?
It’s a bit like cleaning the house. You think, if I can clean up the living room then I’ll be happy. Then you clean up the living room and you think ‘Oh my God, doesn’t the kitchen look terrible now.’ So your next draft is to clean up the kitchen - and I suppose it’s when I can’t see any other rooms that need cleaning up, it’s ready.

How do you feel then?
Relieved. I tend to write fiction in a sustained burst, where I’m trying to stay in a dreamlike state; I have to stay in that dream, stay in the voice. It’s a very tense period for me; I’m in constant fear that some disruption is going to come along and shake me out of that voice – so when I get to the end of that first draft, I simply feel a huge relief that I’ve made it to that point without ‘waking up’.

That’s the emotional peak, thinking ‘I walked across the tightrope and didn’t fall off,’ I’m now on the other side. It may not be any good and I’ll have to go back and revise it and edit it, but I got across.

I feel sick at that later point, when it goes off to the printers, when I’ve touched it for the last time. The fun part of writing a novel is over. Then comes all the un-fun part, the actual publication. It’s all downhill from there.

Do you have any rituals or physical response to finishing?
I go for a surf; just go out and get into the ocean. That’s my physical relief.

Do you start something new straightaway?
I used to think the initial idea was not that important, that what’s important is how you write it and what unfolds as you develop it. But I’ve lost faith in that idea of writing, and now I feel that the original conception of a novel is much more important. So I’m not in a hurry anymore – I’m more selective about when to commit to a new idea.

Malcolm Knox’s new novel The Life will be published in 2011.


ASHLEY HAY

How do you know when a book is finished?
When I've got the ending right. There’s a sort of power in the actual end scene of a book ; once I get it, I think ‘yep, I can bring this all together’, even if it takes another year to do. Until I know how the actual last page is going to read, it feels a bit sort of nebulous.

What’s your emotional response then?
It’s joyful. I don’t tend to feel very optimistic about books when I'm writing them, and this is one moment of pure optimism. I’ve got this burst of energy to take back into the bits that I know aren’t working, and things feel possible in a really different way.

Do you have any rituals associated with finishing?
A publishing friend gives me one. With my latest book, before I sent off the final pages she sent me some instructions for making an origami star. She told me to write the words I wished for my novel on a piece of paper, then fold that into the star, stick it in the envelope with the pages and send it off. I'm very obedient, so I sat there with my piece of square paper - and I just couldn’t follow the instructions. I got so stressed about this fucking origami star! So I rang her in a state, and we both sat there on the phone trying to make sense of it, and I was folding and unfolding and turning and twisting, and then I looked down in my hand and said, ‘I think I've done it. I don’t know what I did, but I've made the right shape.’ That was the most perfect thing, because it’s exactly what a novel is – you’re doing all this stuff, you don’t know what you're doing, you don’t know how to do it, and suddenly you look at it and you see that there it is.

Ashley Hay’s first novel The Body in The Clouds was published last year.


MARGO LANAGAN

How do you know when a book is done?
Suddenly I run out of things to do, and that vague discomfort I've had nagging at me about this book ceases - it doesn't explode into joy or anything, it just stops. I just know I've gone as far as I can, which is always farther than I originally thought I'd have to.  I cast about a bit, and look through notes for ideas about ways I might go, and I realise that I've used all the ones I'm going to use, and the thing now actually has its own shape - partly the shape I envisaged for it, partly its own, slightly surprising shape, which it grew into all by itself.

Also, I can tell it's done when I like all the book's parts enough; when, during that last churn-through, despite the tedium of reading this story for the umpteenth time, there was scene after scene that I looked forward to going through again, and getting righter. I suppose I'm after a certain degree of richness, precision and forward movement throughout, and I can feel that I've mostly got there. There isn't anywhere where I step out and find absolutely nothing underfoot, or only something squashy and insubstantial. It’s all firm; it’s all good.

Any rituals associated with finishing?
To have a glass of wine and permit myself a small moment of self-congratulation, before I look at the other commitments I've allowed to pile up. The wine is sometimes drunk in the presence of the sprinkled-with-corrections last printout of the complete work, so that I can periodically pick it up and feel its weight. I will also make anyone nearby at the time pick it up, feel its weight, and agree that I am a genius.

When are you ready to start again?
I think about the new project and take my imaginative temperature. If I'm still in recovery, there's a little spot of deadness and tiredness in me that will make my every attempt at something substantial peter out in boredom and staleness. If I'm good to go, I'm all energy, through and through; every time I prod the new idea, possibilities flow out of it that are exciting, rather than exhausting, to consider.

Margo Lanagan's fourth collection of stories, Yellowcake, and new novel, The Brides of Rollrock Island, will be published in 2011.  

WENDY JAMES

How do you know you’re finished?
First, when it feels complete enough to let my agent or publisher read it. Then I can leave it alone for a month or so; it might still need some work, technically, even plotwise, but the story is basically there, and in a form that's not going to change too radically. To use a carpentry analogy, the initial work is similar to an unlacquered, unsanded table, with wobbly, slightly uneven legs, and a few dodgy joints ... but you can see that there's a decent piece of furniture there.

How does finish a book compare to finishing a draft?
I'm always drafting and redrafting as I go along. The first 'complete' draft is the one I'll send off. I write very disjointedly, very chaotically - and  I'll have pieced together the whole from parts that have already gone through several drafts, and then excised other bits that don't fit. Back to carpentry: it's as if I've made a whole lot of table components, and then have to get them together, never quite sure until the end whether I actually have made a table. Sometimes there might be five legs, and I have to work out a way of using them all - or perhaps I have to discard one or build another.  And what to do if the top's not long enough, or it turns out it's circular...?

Are there signs the end is approaching?
I think there's a sort of speeding up - a compulsion to get there, rather like the final pushing stage of labour. You just have to get the damned thing out! 

What’s your emotional response to the end?
I feel quite flat usually. Is that it? Oh, shit.

How do you refill the well for the next work?
I've never had to search for something to write about, and hopefully I never will. There's always  a next one simmering away.

Wendy James’ last novel Where Have You Been? was published last year and she has just finished a fifth book.


SHAUN TAN

How do you know when a book is finished? 
Every creative work has a tipping point, where any further progress makes it worse rather than better, and it moves away from its original inspiration in pursuit of a nicely polished object - and those aren't always the same thing. The trick is to sense the tipping point approaching, and to stop slightly short of it. So for me, a work is finished when it's almost finished, i.e. never entirely.

Are there signs the end is coming? 
Often a kind of confusion, or a clouding of judgment. I can't tell if something is good or not: that's a fair sign it may be time to down brushes or close the laptop cover.

Do you feel happy, or a sense of loss?
Both. There is often a longer period of mild depression following the completion of a project, which seems almost chemical in its inevitability, as well as due to creative unemployment. I've learnt that it is very important to have another project on the go, so that I can simply jump tracks, and thus avoid that downward slide.

Do you send it off straightaway?
I prefer to leave a 'finished' work unseen for about a week, then come back and look at it with a fresh eye - I will almost always make very good edits then. I always lament those projects that are not allowed to 'lie fallow' due to deadlines - the flaws glare out at me like an awful beacon for years.

Is it hard to leave a book alone?
The older I get, the easier it seems to be to stop fiddling and fussing, and just let things be. That may be something to do with confidence, trusting my initial instincts more, and relinquishing a certain amount of cerebral control.

Shaun Tan’s new book is The Bird King and Other Sketches.


ADRIAN HYLAND

How do you know when a book is finished?
I don’t, or at least I haven’t thus far in my scrawny career. I have that much, at least, in common with James Joyce: I could quite happily spend twenty years writing a single book. I sometimes spend all day writing a sentence. My beloved editor, Mandy Brett, has to barrel in and say : “Stop!”  She has to come round to my house and drag me away from the keyboard.

Are there signs and signals that tell you the end is approaching?
My editor starts getting stroppy. After twenty years of false starts, I’ve finally realised that if I want to achieve anything as a writer, I’ll have to learn to work to a deadline and actually finish things. In my first attempt at writing a novel, I wrote this great rambling monstrosity of a thing, a Bayeux Tapestry of images and scenes, but not much in the way of plot. That was when I had the idea of writing a crime novel; the genre forces you into a beginning and an end. Arthur Conan Doyle and Raymond Chandler have done all the hard work – the rest of us just have to fill in the blanks.

What is your emotional response to finishing? 
Frustration really, wishing I had done a better job.

Is it hard to leave a book alone?
Yes. If I had my way I’d be sneaking around the bookshops with a pencil in hand, crossing out the sloppy bits, tightening things up.

How soon do you start work on another book?   
I seem to hit the ground running; I’ve usually started thinking about the next one before I finish the last one. Each is a quick selection from an infinite number of possibilities. I’m working on two books at present, but have a lot of other ideas storming through my brain.

It’s not important for me to leave a space between one book and the next – I’m making up for lost time. I didn’t publish my first book until I was almost fifty – got a lot of catching up to do in the brief period allotted to me before senility kicks in. I’m hoping Yeats is my man: wrote his best stuff when he was in his seventies.

How do you go about refilling the well for the next work?  
I don’t know if the well is the right metaphor for me – it’s more like a swamped boat. There’s a lot of bailing out going on.

Adrian Hyland’s second novel is Gunshot Road.