Why You Can't Finish Writing That Novel

The only writing advice that's likely to work, because it comes from you.

Welcome to Story Ecology.

To ask what is the story ecology of a thing? is to look at the stories we tell about that thing, and to imagine how we might story it differently.

If you like something you read here all I ask is that you share it with others. If you do, I’ll show my appreciation with a downloadable digital keepsake created by me as a gift for readers. When you like and share a post of mine, just drop me a note that you’d like the post’s free digital extra and I’ll send it your way.

I’m no longer keeping things behind a paywall but I’m keeping paid subscriptions open because I believe writers should be paid for their work. If you feel my writing is of value and worth supporting for the price of a nice meal out, then I thank you from the bottom of my heart. I also have a one-of-a-kind digital gift for you, too.

Read The Book of Rain, available now.

Wolf, Moon, Dog, my 250-page love letter to dogs, will be published Sept 20^th 2025.

Anyone and everyone can start writing a novel. Few of us get very far, and even fewer ever finish. Why?

*

The Plan

I think the main reason we get stuck and can’t seem to reach “The End” is the very opposite of the reason that most so-called writing gurus will give you. They’ll tell you that you can’t write a novel unless you begin with a structure, a shape, a seven-point narrative arc, a storygraph, or whatever they’re calling it these days. The gurus insist that what’s been holding you back is that you don’t have a plan.

So you buy their six-week course, or their expensive book, because they have The Plan. You buy into their method, and you get The Plan.

But you still can’t get very far, or you can’t finish the task. Often you can barely get started. Why?

With my own writing I’ve come to see that what usually gets me stuck isn’t that I don’t have a plan. What gets me stuck is that I believe I have to have one. The plan itself is the impediment.

*

The Mystery

When I started out as a writer I assumed that what a real writer did was make an outline ahead of time and stick to it, starting their novel on page the first and going until they got to page the last. A real writer would know for sure when they’d reached page the last because they had the plan to tell them.

So I tried that. I tried and tried. I wrote outlines and schematics before I penned a word of the actual story. But it only ever led to frustration and writer’s block. As soon as I knew where the story was going, how it would turn out, where all the beats would drop, I got bored and lost the desire to finish. I was ready to give up, thinking I just didn’t have what it took to be a real writer.

The mistake I made, though I didn’t understand it at the time, was to impose a predetermined structure on the creative process. A structure that turned into a straitjacket.

Only when I accepted that I would have to find the shape of the story as it grew did my writing really take off. Only then I was able to stay with a novel for the long haul and finish it.

For me a work-in-progress had to become like a puzzle I needed to solve. Only then could I get fully involved with it. That’s where the energy came from to keep going and actually get it done.

You want to find out what this thing is. You need to find out. It’s a puzzle. It’s a game. It’s a mystery.

No one can resist a good mystery.

You’ll finally finish your novel for the same reason you read a good book to the very end: because you simply have to find out what happens.

*

The Illusion of Control

Maybe the fact that we can’t get enough of stories with lots of reversals and twists is also true of writers when the writing is going well: what really keeps us writing is this journey of discovery full of reversals, setbacks, and unexpected twists. We can get hooked on finding out what this thing is going to be and how it’ll all turn out in the end. But only if we haven’t spoiled the journey for ourselves by insisting on a full itinerary from the get-go.

Finishing a novel requires stepping out into the unknown. It’s scary when you don’t know where a book is going, but instead of trying to rid yourself of that anxiety with a plan, use it as creative fuel. The uncertainty is actually a good thing. No, it’s a wonderful thing. You’re exactly where you should be. It means the story is alive in your imagination, waiting for you to discover it.

Stay with the tantalizing tension of not knowing. Don’t be afraid of the open questions.

It’s true that having a plan might make you feel better, for a while. It’ll quiet the nagging uncertainty and make you believe that you’ve got everything under control. You might even make some headway thanks to the boost of confidence that having a plan will give you. But that pernicious illusion of control is the very thing that will eventually kill your desire to keep writing. It stifles the joy of discovery, of making mistakes and trying again, of taking side roads that uncover wonderful new possibilities.

With most of the practical, predictable activities we undertake in life, like time-constrained projects at work or renovating a kitchen, going in without a plan will lead to frustration and failure. With creative endeavours the opposite is probably true.

If you stay with the questions and let the answers unfold in their own time, along the way you’ll eventually start to glimpse a growing shape, a trajectory, a path. When you do, that’s the time when some tentative outlining and plotting can be of use, to take stock of what you’ve got so far and how you might round the curve and start in on the home stretch. But be ready to chuck an outline at a moment’s notice if new surprises pop up and suggest a better way.

*

A Story is an Unfolding

What we really need isn’t a detailed road map, it’s to trust ourselves. To trust our own creativity. That’s why I say the only writing advice that’s likely to work comes from you. You just need to let it come forth and show you the way.

Whatever genre you’re writing in or trying to escape from, you’ve probably read a whole bunch of great—and not so great—novels in that genre, and from all of that reading you already have the knowledge, on a profound level your conscious mind can’t access, of how the best of those stories worked their magic on you. Your subconscious keeps this inexhaustible, abiding Story Sense alive, maybe a bit like a mycorrhizal network in a forest, hidden deep in the fertile soil of your mind, working tirelessly even when you’re not writing, storing memories, linking seemingly disparate farflung elements, transforming raw experience into rich creative compost.

A mycorrhizal network in a forest redistributes resources from older, established trees to younger seedlings, helping them survive in difficult conditions. (The network doesn’t do this because it’s the trees’ “friend”—it does it because it has evolved to do it). Your subconscious is always at the ready to do something similar for you and for your fragile seedling of a novel, to feed and support it in hidden ways. The subconscious will draw what you need from older, established stories, to help your story grow.

The problem is, your conscious self can’t just call up that deep magic on demand. The brain doesn’t work that way, stories don’t work that way, and trying to make the process work that way, by imposing a prefabricated plan, will only block up the organic, all-natural storytelling juice that your subconscious is quietly nourishing your writing with behind the scenes.

A story is not a mechanism. It’s more like an ecosystem. It’s an unfolding, in which all of the parts talk to one another as they grow, sometimes cooperating and sometimes competing, perpetually dancing between order and disorder. The unfolding story knows what it needs and when, and it will show you.

*

You Just Knew I Was Going to Bring up Tolkien

In his letters JRR Tolkien revealed that for a long time he had no plan at all when writing The Lord of the Rings. He didn’t know where Frodo and his fellow hobbits were going, or why. He had no idea who Strider was when that travel-worn stranger showed up at the Prancing Pony in Bree. He’d had no previous acquaintance with Saruman or Eowyn or Faramir when they appeared out of nowhere during the writing, flowing suddenly to life from the tip of his pen.

Tolkien had likely never heard of Campbell’s Hero’s Journey schema (The Hero with a Thousand Faces was first published in 1949, by which time LOTR was well on its way to completion) and the whole notion of storytelling-by-plot-points would surely have incensed him.

So if Tolkien went much of the distance without a plan, where did the massive, harmonious, awe-inspiring story architecture that is The Lord of the Rings come from? As Tolkien himself suggests in his essay “On Fairy-Stories” it came from those vast root systems waiting deep within; although he used the metaphor of a simmering cauldron of Story which the world’s storytellers had been contributing to for millennia, and from which every writer draws nourishment. I prefer a more nature-based metaphor myself. Soup just sits there bubbling, while a mycelial network is active and intelligent.

If plotting and graphing aren’t working for you, write into the not-knowing and trust that the answers about shape and beats and how this bit is going to connect to that bit will come. Keep a daily journal in which you talk to yourself about your novel, what it is so far, what it might be, what you don’t yet know about it, and what you do. (That’s what Tolkien did; in all of the reams of scribbled pages he left behind for his son Christopher to sift through you won’t find a word about story arcs or narrative schemas; instead you find Tolkien talking to himself about his growing book, speculating, puzzling, dreaming, coaxing the thing along, following the hidden veins of faerie silver that would link one part of the tale to another).

The answers will come, if you keep the questions coming and the mystery alive. I’m not saying it will be easy. Getting AI to write your novel for you is easy. But then it isn’t really your novel, is it?

*

Getting Lost is the Way Out

In his Substack newsletter, You Are a Story, Will Storr discusses recent scientific research that challenges the long-held belief that traditional story arcs and schemas (like Aristotle’s three acts or Campbell’s hero’s journey) are essential for successful storytelling. These plot structures—these plans—are there in the stories that were analyzed by the researchers, but they aren’t a significant factor in a story’s success or popularity.

This surprising finding strongly suggests that when it comes to stories it’s never been the blueprint that’s been working the magic. Having a plan and trying to fit your story to it, plot point by plot point, not only won’t help you write the book, it also won’t help it sell once it’s written and published.

I’m usually wary of what happens when science attempts to analyze Story, but this research revelation feels liberating to me: even science says you’re probably better off ignoring the plans, the how-to guides, the masterclasses, and just writing.

Despite these new findings, however, Storr can’t bring himself to abandon faith in The Plan altogether. He maintains that traditional story arcs remain valuable tools for writers:

“I remain convinced that many of us writers need a plan. A novelist has a whole world to create – a believable place with realistic characters who are facing fascinating problems that alter them profoundly as they go about the task of tackling them. I’m sure some can start with a blank page and create a masterpiece that has form. But some of us are mortal. Some of us need at least some idea of what the hell to do.”

Make your story 160% better!

Storr is the author of The Science of Storytelling, one of the writing books I keep on my “indispensable” shelf. He’s bang-on that a story is “a believable place with realistic characters who are facing fascinating problems that alter them profoundly as they go about the task of tackling them.” I would only add that it’s important to remember that the characters are living in the story: they’re often blindsided when the fascinating problem hits them, and they usually have no clue how they’re going to solve it, or they try to solve it and they fail, and have to find some other way.

As Sam Gamgee says in The Lord of the Rings about old tales and songs: “You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don’t know. And you don’t want them to.”

What holds for the people we come to care about in the stories we read on the page or watch on the screen should be the same for us when we’re writing one. The writing problems I’m trying to solve should be fascinating to me. I want to tackle them with every scrap of wit and imagination I can muster. And just maybe I’ll be profoundly altered along the way.

The only way any of that is going to happen is if I know as little as possible beforehand about where I’m headed, what shape the journey should have, or where’s it’s all going to end up.

If you’re struggling to finish writing a novel, if you feel stuck or off-course, you’re in the same boat as your protagonist, lost and seeking a way home, and that’s what makes great stories happen: when someone is lost and has to struggle to find the right path to “The End.” Getting lost is the way out.

What I most want to tell you is that if you’re stuck you already know what the hell to do, deep down. Just dive in, and don’t let The Plan, or anybody’s plan, even your own brilliant plan, get in your way.

•

If you enjoyed this post or benefited from it, I’d be grateful if you could leave a like or a brief comment. The stats for my posts show me how many people looked at an essay or read it, but they can’t tell me if my words really spoke to you, or how. That’s why I’m here on this platform and why hearing from readers is so valuable. It keeps me going. Thank you.

[Plant Photography by Karl Blossfeldt and from Flickr; collage by the author]