This has been a big week for the current work in progress. I'm now firmly on the path to the close, for the first draft anyway. So the past few days have been spent not just writing but also wrangling with some of the perennial problems of bringing to an end a book that is only outlined in the roughest of senses.

There's a lot to do in terms of structure and sequencing of events. There are also a lot of notes to be made about material that I've already written that will need to be looked at again in the light of what happens over the next few scenes. This is always the case with me. The first thing I do when I've finished a first draft is go back and start the rewrite process. I can't see any way round this -- and actually I think it's quite a positive chore too. It makes you look more closely at what you've done.

But here's one lesson from the past few days. Not a new one for me, but I always forget it until the need comes up, as it usually does at this stage.

Problem: I've got a few sequenced scenes leading to the denouement. The content works fine. The people are right. So are their actions. But there's something not quite there.

What do I do?

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When I was starting out the answer was plain: start rewriting the whole thing, even though in my heart I felt it was essentially OK. I'm older now and if not wiser, a little more experienced. The solution happens to be a lot easier.

These scenes took place during the morning, directly after a pivotal event in the previous chapter. <em>Wrong decision</em>. What I needed to do was put them back so that they take place at night. This is more atmospheric. It better suits the kind of denouement I have in mind. And it leaves the space for a brief scene at the front of this section which will serve a couple of purposes...
<ul>
	<li>To feed in some essential information for the narrative</li>
	<li>To act as a buffer to the rhythm. The previous scene ended at quite a pace. Some writers try to do pace constantly. I like to vary it. By throwing the pace from fast to medium/slow I get in some essential background and, if I do it well, manage to <em>increase</em> the tension. How? Because readers know they're heading to the end and if you just hold back a little bit on the finale they'll be all the more anxious for it by the time they get there.</li>
</ul>
That's the theory anyway.