The Lines I Didn't Publish No.4
Behind-the-scenes on my latest essay, "Then Everyone Died".
There are a lot of things I love about writing, but getting started isn’t one.
I suffer from a “you’re only as good as your last meal” mentality. This adds unnecessary pressure between hitting publish and drafting the next thing.
On top of being toxic, this fear is unfounded. I genuinely believe that the more we write, the better we get.
Sure, some early editions may outperform contemporaries, but generally, barring a newly formed four-bourbon, deep-fried chicken bucket writing ritual, the arc is upward.
With this logic, we should have nothing to fear when it comes to writing anew.
We should welcome the blinking cursor against a plain doc.
We should hand over the keys to our literary becoming and enjoy the ride.
But logic isn’t feeling, and feeling includes a medley of past shortcomings and public bombs.
Psyching ourselves up to make art is justifiable. But it also creates a barrier to entry that I’d like to remove.
Getting started on my latest piece, Then, Everyone Died, felt no different.
Amazingly, despite the premature death of a family dog, the passing of my husband’s Oma on the same night, and flying to Germany for the funeral—all in one week—the devil on my shoulder suggested I probably had nothing to say!
“Plus, no one likes talk of death!”, I thought with eyebrows scrunched.
And then, I got over myself and started writing.
Writing this particular piece reacquainted me with one of the things I love most about writing: once we lock in, magic happens, and we get to be surprised by where it goes. As we write, part of us becomes the reader too, observing our own reactions and discovering how we actually feel.
I had most of the draft in place after a couple of mornings. The real work happened later, inside Substack, when the piece went from free-flow to finished.
That’s where I figured out how to merge the family dog and Oma. As I was writing, I was convinced these two stories would have to live separately. I spent a hefty number of words at the beginning on the “dog” end of grief, and didn’t want Oma’s transition to feel light or less significant.
But with an ending that captured the theme, I think it felt balanced. I was able to stitch them together into one connective piece about, well, connection.
Here are the final edits I made, along with the ending I drafted on Substack:
