Writing in the Dark's First "Essay in 12 Steps" Challenge

"The journey from the head to the hand is perilous and lined with bodies. It is the road on which nearly everyone who wants to write—and many of the people who do write—get lost.” ~Ann Patchett

When asked what his number one advice for writers was, Neil Gaiman had a simple answer: finish things. You need to write a lot, but more importantly, you need to finish what you write.

Writing in the Dark’s first “Essay in 12 Steps Challenge” starts August 2! Join us!

There is a reason writers so often struggle to finish what we start. While the “morning of writing” is filled with possibility, adventure, and discovery, the “afternoon of writing” is more often an arduous and sweaty ordeal with much grief and little consolation. The truth is, finishing our work hurts us—after all, to finish we must eventually make peace with the paltry popsicle-stick house we’ve built, despite that it falls so short of the gleaming castle once imagined we would built from dew drops and starlight. We must, if we are ever to finish things, mourn the surreally glorious work we’d once imagined—the work that perished en route to the words “the end.” 

As Ann Patchett wrote in her unflinching essay “The Getaway …