There is a Grief That Comes at the End of All Projects

In ten days I will be done with another project.

For a year, I have spent time with the characters of my middle grade novel What He Left Me, and I have held Paulie in my arms, and I have fallen in love with Mr. Langley, and I have rooted for Aunt Bee. I don’t really want to say goodbye. It’s not easy to leave them to their own lives, when they have led me for so long in a story that unfolded much more beautifully than I could have known in the beginning.

So all this week, knowing I have only four installments left with these people I have come to love, the grief has watched my fingers typing out their final words.

When we have spent so much time getting to know characters and their stories and we have begun to genuinely care about their lives and their futures, it’s not easy to let them go. We have poured so much of ourselves into that project, spent a year (or more) of our lives sharing in their world, and now it is finished.

Every writing project must come to an end. And there is a grief to every end.

It’s not always easy to let our projects go, to let our characters go, because sometimes we love them too much to let them go, and we want to know what happens and who they grow up to be, and we just don’t know if they’re ready to stand on their own.

We want to hold those stories close, like children, because it’s a mean world out there and they hold so much of us and what if the world doesn’t like them? What if the world rejects them? What if the world tears them apart more than they have already torn?

We finish these projects, and then we hesitate to give them wings, not trusting them to fly on their own.

We must let them fly.

Fear hides along the edges of grief, too. Because sometimes we only have a dim outline of what comes next, and we’re not sure we’ll like those characters as much as we like these ones we must say goodbye to in another ten days, and who even knows if we can do it again? We don’t have any guarantees. We just have a hard goodbye and a harder hello.

Fear chases every story’s end: What if we can’t do it again? We’ve done it once. We can do it again.

In this goodbye place, I feel the questions pressing in. What’s next? What if it’s not any good? What if I choose the wrong next? It’s easier just to hang on to that old story than to start a new one.

But every beginning has an ending, and this is just another.

Maybe we will miss our characters, and maybe we will miss the story they told, and maybe we will miss seeing them every day, but they are ready to stand on their own. And we have to let them, because there is more to be done. More stories to be told.

We can’t pursue a project longer than it needs to be pursued, and we can’t tell more of a story than needs to be told, so we must trust our endings and embrace our beginnings. So, in ten days, I will say goodbye to Paulie and Charlie and Aunt Bee and Mr. Langley, and I will turn to the new ones who wait for their story to be told.

Because this is what it means to be a writer.

3 questions to ask when you’ve finished a project:

1. What do I want to do with this?

It’s all well and good to finish a project, but now what? No one will ever know about our project if we don’t get it out there–whether it’s submitting to agents and editors or deciding to self-publish. I’m all for putting our best work forward, but after a certain point, we have to get it out there. Make sure you ask what’s next for your project, and write down those goals in black permanent marker so your fears don’t rewrite them.

2. What’s next?

I know that sounds like the exact same question you asked above, but this one is different, I promise. This is a “What should I work on next?” Ideally, we should have such a tight workflow and brainstorm practice that we already have another project in mind–and maybe even have a bit of it brainstormed.

This question is important, because it ensure that we’ll continue writing–and the best way to combat the fear that we’ll never produce something as wonderful as the story we just wrote is to keep writing.

3. What are my plans for next week? Next month? Next year?

(I know, this sounds like the others, too, but I promise it’s different.) At the end of every book I write, I like to evaluate what’s next. It’s so easy, when we finish a project, to feel that sense of accomplishment and bask in it for a little too long. It’s okay to bask in it for a week or so. But we have to get back on our feet. So I like to make my plans for next week and next month and next year–not just for the finished project or the next one in line, but for my entire career.

Writing changes us. Our goals are constantly changing. That means that once we’ve poured ourselves into an entire project, we may find that we no longer have a desire to do what we’d originally planned. It’s always good to have an evaluation process, and what better time than when a project is done?

Rachel is the author of the kid-lit fantasy series, Fairendale; the poetry book, This is How You Know; and the Family on Purpose series. She writes about writing on her blog This Writer Life, contributes regularly to Huff Post and faithfully writes 5,000 words of fiction and nonfiction every day.