The Big Reveal

​The Big Reveal at the end of my novel is not going well.  Four chapters in and I’ve ground to a halt.  Keep writing, I commanded myself.  Get to the end of the first draft of this part before you start thinking about changing it – once it’s written, it can be polished a thousand times until it’s brilliant.  Even diamonds were rough and ugly once.  But despite my excellent advice, I sank into a dull, grey despair yesterday, matching the dull, grey clouds that refused to shift.  This morning I woke up in the dead hours and couldn’t get back to sleep – not the best way to start a Sunday.  But you’ve been stuck before, my daughter said to me, you’ll get out of it.  What is hard to explain is that when it doesn’t go well with one part of a novel, you feel as if the entire thing has collapsed, that it’s entirely awful, that you’ve wasted a year, that you’re only worthy of cleaning other people’s toilets.  I’ve never struggled as much with a novel as with this one, which leads me to believe it must be truly terrible.  What am I doing?  Why am I doing this?  Why am I torturing myself?  Why don’t I change my name to Pollyanna Putitabout and write porn?  It’s what sells, after all.  (Or, since initials are so popular now, how about P.A. Putitabout.)
I’m going to have to dump the four chapters and start again.  I have to change the style, the voice, the story itself, the names, the back history, the motivations and the methods of torture.  I have to change the name of God.  I have to change the world.
It really is just too much to ask.