How to finish
Q. Dear Camille,
I want to write a book, but sometimes it seems like my mind gets too crowded and I get bombarded with a million ideas. So I start writing them down—but then after four or five chapters, the ideas stop and I don’t know how to keep going. Can you help? —M
A. Dear M,
Writing a book is just making one decision after another until you type “The End.” So when one of my clients tells me they’re stuck, I explain that it’s never because they literally can’t make a decision. It’s because they’re afraid of making the wrong one—and they really, really want to write the right thing.
What is right, anyway? For most writers, that means feeling inspired, satisfied, excited, or joyful while drafting. We take this as a sign that our writing will be well received, which is what we want; if we don’t feel this way, we assume the story's no good.
But having published seven novels, I can assure you that’s not how it works. My third book, Forever is the Worst Long Time, was the hardest writing experience I’ve ever been through; I wrote the first draft in all caps (no joke) because I just could not stop judging myself and had to make it more difficult to read what I'd written. After I was done, I thought I’d created a piece of absolute garbage. Now all these years later, I believe it’s my best book to date, and though it hasn’t sold as well as some of my other novels, it has received the most starred reviews and praise. You never know what will happen—and that’s fine. As writers, it’s not our job to know how our work will be received. It’s our job to create.
It's important to note that your thoughts about your writing—not your writing itself—create your emotions. The thought “I don’t know how to keep going” is probably making you feel confused and/or discouraged. Try to come up with a thought that’s better but also believable, like, “Writing new scenes makes me more creative,” or “The only way to figure this out is to get it on the page.”
Which is not to say you have to think happy thoughts the whole time you’re writing. Recognize that you’re going to feel a whole gamut of emotions—enthusiasm, dread, satisfaction, disappointment. None of them are a sign anything has gone wrong or right. You’re not going to know everything about your story right away, either. Give yourself permission to make the next best decision you can ... and know that you’ll fix it later if it doesn’t turn out the way you were hoping for.
—Camille