SECTION VI

THIS IS THE END

Remember the quote from Jeff O’Neal: “You are going to spend your whole life learning to write, and then you are going to die”?

If you’ve completed a good number of these experiences, you’ve had a chance to develop your writing practice. As our practices evolve, it’s easy to lose sight of how far we’ve come. In graduate school, I had to produce a book-length thesis. In my case, it was a collection of short stories. I’d worked on the stories for three years with monklike devotion, and by the end of my studies—at age twenty-seven—I figured I was pretty far along on my journey as a writer.

Now, I’d never actually published a short story, but I thought that was just a matter of time, of putting a story in front of the right editor at the right time, of getting lucky. I did publish a story (the one discussed in the chapter on titles) about a year after graduation, and then another, and another, and then lots of other different kinds of writing, and so on and so on, until twenty years later, when I’ve reached the point where this will be my seventh book.

Looking back at it that way, I’m astonished by my own life: that I’ve grown so old, but also that I’ve made a career of the kind of work I spent hours and hours dedicating myself to during graduate school. A year or so ago, I pulled my graduate thesis off the shelf where it lives in my living room. I don’t know if it’s still the case, but at the time one bound copy of every thesis went into the university library, and one went to the graduating student. I hadn’t looked at the stories in many years. Some of them I hadn’t thought about since my graduation.

I was surprised by what I found, but I shouldn’t have been. It’s not that the stories were bad, exactly, but neither were they good. With hindsight, I recognized the writer who was crafting those stories was not yet ready to be published. There is a clear difference between the stories in my thesis and those that would be published.

When I look at my first published stories versus the fiction I write now, I can see significant additional growth. I’ve been writing professionally for not quite twenty years, and yet I know that, in many ways, I’m just getting started. There’s much better work in my future than my past.

The same is true for everyone, so this isn’t the end end; it’s just the end of one part of a much longer journey.

Taking a moment to reflect on where you’ve come from and where you’re going seems appropriate.