New Beginnings, Stubborn Persistence, and the Joy of Making Things Up

There’s something wonderfully strange about finishing a book.

For months—or years—you carry this imaginary world around in your head. You worry about people who don’t exist. You argue with characters who refuse to behave. You rewrite sentences that seemed perfectly fine yesterday and suddenly look ridiculous today. You convince yourself the whole thing is brilliant, then terrible, then maybe brilliant again.

And somehow, if you keep going, eventually there is a book.

That may be the biggest lesson I’ve learned from writing: persistence matters more than inspiration.

Inspiration is wonderful when it shows up. It gives you that rush of excitement when a new idea clicks into place or a character suddenly becomes real. But inspiration is unreliable. It has terrible work habits. Persistence is the thing that actually gets the book finished.

You keep writing when the chapter isn’t working. You come back the next day when you have no idea what happens next. You rewrite. You cut things you loved. You put things back. You change your mind. And eventually, almost without realizing it, you’ve moved from “I’m writing a book” to “I wrote a book.”

That feels pretty incredible.

And for me, finishing Silent Fall: The Vanishing represents more than simply completing a novel. It feels like a new beginning.

It’s the beginning of a series. It’s the beginning of Firetree Press. It’s the beginning of building a community around stories, ideas, survival, resilience, and all of the strange questions that speculative fiction lets us explore.

Mostly, though, it reminds me why I enjoy telling stories in the first place.

There is something deeply satisfying about inventing people and putting them into impossible situations. You get to watch them make mistakes, surprise you, disappoint you, become stronger, fall apart, and sometimes discover things about themselves that you didn’t know when you started writing them.

Then, if you’re lucky, somebody else opens the book and those imaginary people become real for them too.

That may be my favorite part of being an author.

A story starts as something completely private—just an idea rattling around in one person’s head. Eventually it becomes something another person can experience. They can worry about the characters, argue with their choices, wonder what happens next, and carry pieces of that fictional world around with them.

That’s an awfully fun thing to get to create.

So if you’re working on something of your own—a novel, a painting, a business, a strange idea nobody else quite understands yet—my advice is very simple:

Keep going.

You don’t have to know exactly where it leads. You don’t have to feel inspired every day. You just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Eventually, you may look up and discover that the thing you once imagined is sitting there in front of you.

And that’s a pretty amazing feeling.