The End Is in Sight

I have a tendency, when the end of something is in sight, to want to get there as quickly as possible. I love the dopamine hit that comes from completing a task, from checking something off my list, from clearing the decks for the next big project.

This is a wonderful work ethic for an administrative assistant with a stack of papers to file or a store clerk with a stack of denim to fold, but it is a terrible tendency in a writer. 

Why? Because a story is not a box of jeans that need to be folded. It is not a stack of papers that needs to be arranged in color-coded folders. I went into 2025 thinking that it was. I had notes from readers and notes from my agent, and I was determined to go through my novel chapter by chapter and finally get to the end of the pile. But, by the time I got through the first few chapters, I realized something needed to be changed in the first. 

This is the thing that drives me crazy about writing. The end is always in sight, and also always a moving target. I picture each story like a tapestry, one that is always too big for the table I am making it on. It drapes over the sides and onto the floor. Parts of it wrinkle and bunch on the other side of the room. And every change I make–every thread I tighten–shifts all the others. I move on to the next corner, and the corner I just worked on for hours to get smooth is suddenly snared. 

So after a few weeks of setting (and failing) a series of time-bound goals, I burned out. I stopped writing entirely. I sputtered through a Tuesday and then skipped Wednesday and Thursday and by the time Friday came, I had taken so many days off already, I figured I may as well take another one. And then it was the weekend, and it has never made any sense to me to be productive on a weekend, so I just wasn’t.

When I came back to my project on Monday, I was feeling like a big, fat failure, but it is always in those moments of defeat that I am able to give myself a little bit of grace. 

Just open the manuscript, I told myself. Go to the spot where you left off and just see what’s there. 

So, I opened the Word document. I scrolled down to the place where I had stopped. And with that little bit of permission and freedom in mind, I felt myself settle in. That’s what the best writing feels like to me–not a mad dash to get something done, but a sort of relaxing into the sentences that are already there and finding what’s in between them. A bit of backstory that wasn’t there before. A new metaphor that floats shiftlessly to the surface. 

It was in this settling in that I remembered: this is how I write best. Not when I am up against a clock. Not when I am trying to achieve or accomplish or perform, but when I am letting myself write what needs to be written, when I am letting my work be what it needs to be.