Exploring the Space of the Ending (Part 4/4)

The concluding post of tracking my work on finishing off the current book-length chapter of my work-in-progress, and moving on

This will the last post of a chain preceded by parts one and two and three.

Spent most of my writing time this week on returning multiple times to the last 8 pages or so of the ending of my manuscript. As described in previous posts, I’d basically gotten the text close to the shape of its basic form after much finagling, though still didn’t feel like the sentences themselves did everything I wanted.

On Monday and Tuesday, I returned to the last 8 paragraphs of the final major movement reading from where I felt it lost its grip, carefully pruning and augmenting the sentences that were there to make them flow better and feel better, focusing first most on the logic, then the sound.

I feel like most often, at least on first push of drafting, sound dictates logic first for me, in that I find I like the way something sounds and work to try to make it gel with what surrounds it in the preceding gist of the text. In revision, however, logic tends to push past sound, especially where the former gets hairy or unclear, and forces you to ‘make it make sense’ before anything else.

Sometimes this ends up in needing sentences that sound less interesting on the surface but do the job of moving the story where you want, even if only semantically or by gut. The job becomes reading through each sentence, and then the paragraph in full, and working with it until you feel it finally hits both sides of the walls.

Once the logic flows more clearly, you can get back to make the sentence more interesting, if necessary, by reviewing the word choices of verbs and adverbs in particular, until the sentence once again feels exciting as a language object while still maintaining the logic you’d made sure does what you want.