Member-only story

The Real Reason You Can’t Finish Your Novel

Kendra Sparkles
5 min readJan 5, 2023

--

And what you can do about it!

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

Wait, let me guess. You opened this post armed with your list of perfectly valid reasons why you started writing a novel but never finished it. Please do yourself a favor, take that list, rip it up, and stomp on it. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s dive in.

With a New Year comes a new list of resolutions that, if you’re anything like me, you give up on by approximately February 3rd. How many years in a row have you proclaimed that this was the year you would finish your novel? Then life got in the way. There were bake sales, school drop-offs, deadlines at work, and a solid few months where you got really into Crossfit. Wait, Is that still a thing?

Before you know it, you’re ringing in another New Year filled with plot holes and abandoned protagonists waiting in literary limbo for you to kindly give their character that steamy romance scene you promised.

Whenever I tell people I finished the first draft of my novel in less than three months, they seem mildly impressed or maybe just amused that a stranger walked up to them on the street and shared that bit of information. But when I tell them the rest of it, the part where I was also raising two babies under two and wrote the entire novel during their naptime, for some reason, this compels people to tell me all…

--

--

Kendra Sparkles
Kendra Sparkles

Written by Kendra Sparkles

I'm off somewhere writing a novel...

Responses (5)