Writing Life: The End?

There's a definite, specific kind of satisfaction that comes from reaching the end of a draft. (Even if it is the do-or-die vomit draft.) It's a completely different sensation than the one I felt as a critic and/or journalist when I finished writing a review or or a celebrity profile or the like: it feels like utter relief on the one hand... and utter dread on the other. For now, that little voice in my head says, the hard work truly begins.

(That would be rewriting, editing, and — gasp — actually sitting down to read this first draft, something I'm putting off until next week.)

Today, I finished the first draft of the feature script — it's a psychological/supernatural thriller — that has been kicking around in my head the last few months, one that I've been working on between polishes of my most recent pilot while jugging parenting and my job. It's the first feature script I've ever written so when I came to that final moment, when you write Fade Out and The End, that moment arrived with a mixture of emotions: accomplishment, pride, relief, and terror.

(Fade In, on the other hand, has its own unique set of challenges, circumstances, and emotions swirling around it.)

I feel like that is the default state of writers, who tend to live in a kingdom existing equidistant between terror and anxiety most of the time. It's certainly true for me, any time I write a script. My head begins to echo the voice of my inner critic, wondering if this is good enough (or any good), whether this was the right script to write right now or whether I ought to have written that OTHER thing, whether my critique partners and friends will like it or hate it, and whether I'll like it or hate it when I finally sit down to read the thing.

For now, it's a bit like Schrödinger's Script: It exists and it doesn't. It's amazing and terrible. It's full of potential and devoid of it. Now is the point in time where it is all things and nothing at once. It exists in a state of Limbo where it consumes my thoughts and my dreams but I try to push it out of my mind until that moment when I print out the damn thing and sit down to read it. Will I fall in love with it? Or will I wonder what the hell I was thinking when I wrote it? (Or both?)

I'm both excited and terrified for that moment to arrive. Because as all writers know, The End is the really just the beginning...