I thought I knew exactly how the book was going to end.

If you’ve ever tried to write a novel or short story, you probably already know what happened next.

It turned out that I did not, in fact, know how the book was going to end. Because the ending I tried just didn’t work. It fell flat. It wasn’t just that I hated it. It simply did not belong in this book.

This, of course, snet me down a long and agonizing path full of worry and doubt. Was I really the right person to write this story? If I couldn’t figure out how to end it, was it even worth finishing?

Things got worse. Scrolling through the almost 70,000 words I had written, I began to notice things. Bad things. Things that I’d written that just weren’t good, or didn’t seem like they fit.

Suddenly I realized I…