Saying goodbye

Hav­ing just fin­ished a book, I am filled, as I often am, with sad­ness. I quick sur­vey of writ­ing friends tells me this is a com­mon phe­nom­e­non. “Why?” I asked. “Because you have lived with your char­ac­ters so long, and now you have to say good­bye. You are say­ing good­bye to dear friends.”

I wrote about this in a post on Feb­ru­ary 15, 2014:

It is one of the curiosi­ties of my own writer’s life that when I fin­ish a book, and tru­ly know that it is done, I feel sad. It has hap­pened any num­ber of times. The best rea­son I can sug­gest is that I have to put the char­ac­ters aside, and I miss them. After all, I have come to know them, live with them, strug­gle with them, and enjoy them. For awhile, as in days of my child­hood, they became my imag­i­nary friends. All very well to think about them while you are writ­ing about them, but when you are done … they belong to read­ers now.

I had fin­ished The True Con­fes­sions of Char­lotte Doyle. My edi­tor (Richard Jack­son) and I agreed on that. Done. On to the next book. Then, a call from Richard. “I’ve been think­ing,” he said. “We skipped a scene. When Char­lotte leaves the boat, she does not know what is going to hap­pen. She needs to say good­bye to the crew.”

I rec­og­nized he was right, and set to work, writ­ing that brief scene, in which Char­lotte says farewell to her favorite crew mem­bers. As I wrote, I too was say­ing good­bye to Char­lotte. My eyes welled with tears.