The Work In Progress (sorry, still can't say) is now pretty much there in first draft. All it needs is a closing scene of around 1,200 words and then the whole story is there, start to finish.

I'm not going to write that now. Instead I'm going to go back to the beginning, read and revise everything (which may take a couple of weeks since I'll be on the road) and <em>then</em> produce those 1,200 words.

Why?<!--more-->

Here are the main reasons that come to mind.
<ul>
	<li>This final scene is going to be quite melancholy and resonant. There may be something I can hark back to in it that's escaped me at the moment. Doing the revise first could prompt its recall.</li>
	<li>The revision work is more important.</li>
	<li>There's no real reason to work on scene now, unless there's time pressure and there isn't. I know in broad outline what it's going to do. I can write it at leisure. Probably half a day at most whenever I need to do it.</li>
</ul>
Writing a book is about more than putting down words in a manuscript. It concerns tinkering and tweaking and reading. Reading the rough draft you're not happy with, and whatever second draft comes to replace it. Beginning writers often think of completion as writing that last chapter. After which you open the champagne and shout, 'Yay! We're there.'

I haven't seen things that way in a very long time. Usually close to the end of the book I know what I want to say when I close the narrative. The challenge is to find the best way of saying it, not to get words down on 'paper'. Reading the story as a whole first, before attempting that, helps me clarify what I want to achieve there.

The other way to approach this is to write that final scene earlier, when you've still got chapters to complete before it. I've done that before, too, though nothing like as often as leaving the thing till after a full revise. And racing ahead that way invariably means something, sometimes something substantial, will have to change from the first stab too.

Not that rewriting is a big deal. This isn't a hunk of marble, ruined forever by one clumsy stab with a chisel, or a movie hamstrung by a single naff scene we can't, for whatever reason, manage to reshoot. Writers are lucky that we build worlds with nothing more than words, which come free of any cost except our time and intellect. It makes sense to me to use that luck as much as possible. Dodging the linear constricts of the narrative process can often make for a better story.