“The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.” – Ernest Hemingway

I was feeling conflicted about the book I’m currently writing. I had to stop and ask myself why. Do I want to continue with a manuscript that doesn’t hold my heart? If I don’t love it, how can I expect my readers to enjoy it? So, I sat with my conflicted feelings, noting that I had dragged my feet about writing this book. I had a chapter written and was loving the feeling of writing it and loving where my characters were in that first scene . . . I had an outline for the book set up. Then I just stopped. July, August, September and almost the full month of October went by without a word of the story committed to paper or anywhere else.

Procrastination while writing a novel was new to me. When I wrote Chimera and Curses, I couldn’t commit the story to paper quick enough and as I was finishing it the idea for Vizard came to me. I had a brief cooling-off period, and I wrote Vizard to completion. So why was I struggling with this book?

“Finishing a good book is like leaving a good friend.” – William Feather

Then I realized it wasn’t the manuscript I was having these feelings about, it was that this was the end of my first book series. I’m writing a goodbye to the people who have lived in my head since the idea of writing a book formed in my brain. I wrote The Ember Stone—book one—in 2020, but I had thought of it and even wrote a few unsuccessful chapters a few years before that. But all that was ending. I was grieving the experience and connections I had made with my characters and their lives.

“There’s a lot more to writing a book than writing a book.” – Linda Fulkerson

It’s not the end, though. Those characters will live on in the pages of those books and I can revisit them whenever I would like. Those characters have given birth to fresh story ideas—completely separate writing adventures—that wait for me to embark upon when I’m ready. This grieving is a normal part of the process, and when I sat with it and just let it be what it was, the feeling of sadness receded and the writing flowed. No more procrastination and no more feeling discomfort with my manuscript.

“The thing about finishing a story is that finishing is really only the beginning.” – William Herring

This is an experience that I’m adding to my skills and understanding as a book coach. Grieving the writing process, the characters, and the end of a story is real. Perhaps not the most talked about experience among writers, but an actual by-product of time spent—intimate time spent—with characters and words.

By Shari Marshall – 2023