Week of 11 February 2002

There's no better feeling than writing the final line of a novel.

I've been through that seven times now (eight if I count my book with Billy Mills), and every time it happens, I feel both satisfaction and a tremendous sense of completion. I finished Nights in Rodanthe on Sunday, Feb. 10 at 12:38 pm EST, and though I still have to edit the novel, in my mind, the hard part is completed. If you wonder whether I have any special ceremonies though, I don't. I simply take the rest of the day off to enjoy the feeling, and do whatever it is I'm in the mood for. As fate would have it, I was flying to Los Angeles later that afternoon to do a commentary for the DVD version of A Walk to Remember, so I decided that the best way to relax was to read something great, and I found just the book. Slaves in the Family by Edward Ball (Winner of the National Book award for non-fiction) was riveting, fascinating and well-written, and I'll be adding that to my Reading List. It was, I thought, a great way to reward myself, and I'd like to publicly congratulate the author on the fabulous job he did.

Like I said, there's no better feeling than finishing. As I often joke with my agent, I love to "have written," it's the "writing" part that sometimes leaves me sleepless.

Writers, of course, vary in how they approach the work, once the first draft of their novels is complete. Some may re-write the novel from scratch after the first draft, others go through many drafts working from what they've written, still others do no editing at all. I fall somewhere in between, and I'll spend the next ten days or so, re-reading the novel line by line, and making sure the novel is exactly what I want it to be. It's tedious work, but to me, it's far less difficult than the actual "creation" of the work, and over the years, I've learned to enjoy the process. It's a nice break from what I've been doing, and it gives me time to recharge my batteries, so to speak.

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