Setting your share

When you set your share, you change the depth of the cutter on the moldboard of your plough, to cut more deeply into the soil.  It is also an old title for my first novel, which I am rewriting.

I am still rewriting.  I am 10K from the end, but I am still rewriting.  How is it possible that I am still rewriting this novel?  You might well ask.  Last week I wrote past a big hinge in the book, one of those pacy climaxy scenes where much is revealed and resolved and the plot swivels round to run in a different direction, pellmell toward the end.  Well, that’s the plan, anyway.

So why, this morning, have I gone backward into two short scenes before these big climaxy scenes that I’m happy with?  In looking at them, I realized I needed to set my share lower.  I needed to dig deeper.  I had set some situations up and then, somehow, let my character off the hook.  No pleasure can come from that.  This forever going backward does nothing for my word count, but it does mean that I am digging as deeply as I can into this story and these characters.  I am ripping into the situations I have set up and laying them open, as bare as I can.  I am preparing the soil, I suppose, for the end of the book, of what I hope will grow for the characters, for their lives when I stop writing.

Or is this all just a tactic to delay my finishing?  Am I so in love with these characters and their strange world that I cannot – gulp – let go of them?  I have heard it said that you are not finished with a book until you are sick to death at the sight and thought of it.  I cannot imagine feeling that, ever, so that must mean I’m nowhere near done.  Still, I’m on track to finish my rewrite in 2 weeks time and hand it back to a couple of lovely readers.  Check back and see if I’m on track, won’t you?