Small Steps Create a Story Worth Telling

Those first steps in writing can feel almost laughably small. You write a paragraph, maybe a page. You look at how far you have to go and wonder how any of these anecdotes become a story, let alone a novel.

The surprising answer is, it does. Just not in the way you can see yet.

Progress in writing is strange. It doesn't always feel like progress while it's happening. A chapter finished on a Tuesday evening when you'd rather have done anything else. A scene that finally clicked after three attempts that didn't work before. A character who started as a sketch and slowly became someone you actually know. None of it feels dramatic in the moment. But something is quietly shifting underneath, without announcement.

There are tools that can help. The rhythm you build helps. To know the backstory of your characters can help. The point of view, writing in the present or the past, can also make a huge difference. But what carries you through, more than anything, is the relationship you develop with your own story and your main characters. That gradual, sometimes surprising sense that these people and places have become real to you. When that happens, finishing stops feeling like a distant obligation and starts feeling inevitable.

And then one day it's done. Your story has come to life.

Here's what nobody quite warns you about: the thing you've made will outlast the making of it. A novel, a memoir, a family history, whatever shape your story takes, doesn't belong only to a readership of strangers. It belongs to the people who will one day want to know who you are. Your friends. Your children. Your grandchildren, who haven't been born yet. One day, they will hold your book in their hands, and your story will mean something to them. It may help them make a decision about their lives. Or bring them comfort when they are curled up on the couch. Your story will make an impact.

Your stories are worth telling, and it's important to remember that it begins as one page that, with time, will turn into two.

I remember the moment I held my first finished novel. What struck me wasn't relief, or pride exactly, it was the simple, solid fact of it. It's here. I made this. And no one can ever take it away from me.

That's waiting for you too.

-Elle van Rijn