Let the Writing Take You Where

The only way to free yourself from the fear of writing is to do the writing. The only way to advance the work is to sit with it. Perhaps the hardest part of writing is the book's final quarter. And if you write like I write, which is to say scene by scene and absent an outline, you are writing with no safety net. You have jumped and you are hanging from a bungee cord. You do not know if you have a book until you write its final line.

There's panic bound up in that. There is (but of course) anxiety.

But there is also the essential-to-me element of surprise, the waking up to the I don't know what, to the question, Where is this story taking me?

Yesterday, after a morning of mulling and worry, sketching and retreating, I turned to the computer to type up the page I thought I had in my head. The first sentence was how I'd constructed it, rehearsed it. Into the second I inserted an uncalculated detail. That detail took me off the expected trail, so that by the fourth sentence, my well-rehearsed scene was being substituted by the unforeseen and strange. I went with it—what was my choice?—and just as I came to a stopping place, a tree limb fell on a wire nearby. Our house went off the grid; my page went off the screen. When power returned just a few minutes later, I had nothing but a vague sense of what I'd written moments before.

I couldn't, I discovered, recreate the scene. I tried. I got that first sentence in, the second one, too, but now somewhere inside sentence number five, a new detail fought its way in. Trust it, trust yourself, I told me.

Never the light at the end of the tunnel until there is the light.