A programmer friend of mine once described his job as like banging your head against the wall all day, every day, with brief interruptions of euphoria. That most days consist of staring at your work frustrated and saying to yourself "Why the hell isn't this working?" Why is it crashing? Why is it giving that error? Why is it behaving like that?

Searching and searching and searching through the code, making tweaks and trying them out, making more tweaks and trying them out. Getting frustrated and giving up and coming back. Re-writing whole sections, reverting to earlier versions, on and on and on, until you hit on the one approach, that didn't feel like it was going to be any different than any other, just snaps into place and the damn thing works.

It feels deeply, almost absurdly good when it finally works.

That's how I spent the last two years finishing the first draft of Eternal September.

Comic panel of two characters in an empty room with scattered boards and a tipped stool. One says, “Oh heck yeah,” while the other points and says, “Look at that!” — A panel from "Eternal September"

For those just joining: Eternal September is one of two graphic novels that grew out of a bigger, messier project about early internet culture, friendship, and what we share online. That original book was too unwieldy to work, so I split it into two separate stories. This one has been in development for... longer than I planned. Much longer.

I’ve been stuck in versions of this loop before, on other books, long before Eternal September. I wrote about one of those earlier struggles years ago. You can read that here.

The story just wasn't coming together the way I needed it to. The climax wasn't as emotionally powerful as I knew it could be. Character motivations became convoluted. You sympathies were in confusing places. The solution to problem A created a new problem in area B, and on and on and on and on.

With my collaborator Jesse and I we tweaked, and re-wrote, and analyzed, and adjusted endlessly. For months on end. Until the moment when—and I didn't know it at the time—I tried the last set of changes. What if I take this approach to this scene? Combined with this change we made earlier...

Now I don't care about sports, but I've been to several football games with my dad when I was younger, and the only way I have to describe this is to make a sports analogy.

I made a tweak after years of making months and months of tweaks, and suddenly it was like a break opened up in the defensive line, and I could see an open space that led all the way to the other end of the field.

I could see my way from the moment I was writing all the end of the book.

Everything that needed to be set up was set up. Everything you needed to understand in order to make the climax pay off you understood. Everything that needed to be true in the state of the world—which character knew what, what character was where—was all true, was all correct.

I ran as fast as I could.

An open laptop displaying a script sits on a dark table surrounded by books, papers, a ruler, and a water bottle, suggesting focused writing work.

I spent hours just sprinting through the script, just bounding towards the end. And when I wrote, for the first time, in two years, a line that ended the book, when I had in front of me a complete first draft, I literally cried.

The script still needs revisions, of course, and then there's the small matter of drawing the entire thing. But a little while ago, for the first time in ages, I have a complete draft that works. I know what this story is.

Comic panel at night showing two characters running down a street. One laughs and asks, “How’d it go?” The other runs ahead, replying, “Amazing!” — A panel from "Eternal September"

I don't know if there's a lesson here exactly. I don't know if I can tell you what the magic adjustment was, because it was so specific to this particular tangle of problems that it wouldn't mean anything to anyone else.

What I can tell you is that the breakthrough didn't announce itself. I didn't have a moment of clarity where I thought "this is it, this is the one that's going to work." It felt like every other attempt I'd made over the many months working on this —tentative, hopeful in a tired way, probably wrong.

And I can tell you that I'm grateful I didn't give up on the attempt before the one that worked.

Because that's the thing about creative work that nobody warns you about: the only vantage point where the path is clear is from the finish line, looking back.

It sucks.

If you want to follow along as I figure out what comes next—whether I move into revisions on this book or start drawing its sibling story first—Patreon supporters get behind-the-scenes access to the decision-making process, plus early looks at whatever comes next.

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Matthew Bogart