I am at the end of my novel…except for one thing. The story won’t stop.

I hadn’t expected this. This is a book that I knew backwards and forwards before I even wrote the first word. I knew where it was supposed to end.

I knew the characters and why they were going to act the way they were. I knew all their troubles and their paranoias and what kinds of things they carried in their pockets, and who gave them their first kiss, and what their parents’ marriages were like, and what color their eyes are, and what kind of cars they drove. These people, I tell you, were like my best friends.

And then–well, now I can’t get them to go away.

It’s a little like houseguests. Rowdy, interrupting houseguests who are constantly telling you more of the story.

But the thing is, I love the things they are telling me. They’ve become deeper and more individualized as they keep explaining more and more. Suddenly scenes that I wrote for them that seemed complete are growing and becoming more multi-dimensional.

I know what you’re thinking. They’re my characters, I invented them, and I could just kick them out. But now I’m curious about them. I want to know more about why Sam hated his father for so long, and whether that hatred really was just a kind of wounded tenderness that he couldn’t express. And why was Harris such a lousy father? Was it really because his marriage was so bad that he couldn’t separate out his love for his son from his dissatisfaction with his wife? Or was he disappointed in Sam’s personality? (He was kind of a whiny wimp when he was a little kid.)

Tomorrow, though, I am going to have to take matters into my own hands. I think I’ll write their very last scene…the one that finishes with the words THE END written just below it. And then I’ll go back to where I am right now in the book, and write up to that last scene. Sometimes that’s the only way to get characters to understand that their story really is, well, done. To just finish it. Give them their closure.

And by the way–Wednesday for my virtual blog tour, I’ve written a post at the Trashionista blog, which is just about the coolest blog going! I am so pleased to be included on their site…and best of all, Diane Shipley, who runs the blog, has told me that she’s going to be posting a review of A Piece of Normal later this week. Please go over and check out Diane’s site. She has interviews and guest blogs by so many good writers! It’s a very fun site.

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