Category: writing life

Is it ready yet?

I wish there were a surefire way of knowing when a piece was finished.

I’ve been working on — and reworking — an essay over the past two months, and I’m reaching the point of frustration with the effort. Mostly, I’m getting frustrated with myself for the constant tweaking I’ve been doing with it. I feel like I’ve been working it over more than I should, but I still don’t feel the piece is ready yet.

If only there were a surefire way of knowing when a piece was finished. Maybe a writer’s version of the pop-up thermometer used to determine when the Thanksgiving turkey is ready to take out of the oven. Could someone please invent that for me?

In the meantime, I took to the internet to ask some writers for their take on how to know when a piece is done.

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Why we write: thoughts from Junot Díaz

One of the author websites I read regularly is Junot Díaz’s StoryWorlds. Diaz is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, among other titles, and through his Substack writings he generously shares his ideas about the writing craft with his readers. A recent post, When the Words Become Breath, or A First Novel Written in Darkness, is one of his more personal entries, and it strikes at the heart of the question of why we write, and what we should expect from our efforts.

It’s also a hopeful story for anyone who struggles with depression, as Díaz did during his senior year of high school — “a depression of the deep dark kind.”

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