How Do You Know When a Creative Work Is Finished? ...plus a special offer

This month, I’ve been pondering how to know when a piece I’m writing is finished. I've included a free offer and some pretty farm pictures.

Apr 01, 2025

This is It Takes A Village, a monthly conversation about reading, writing, and community-building.

Welcome, lovely subscribers, lurkers, readers, and writers! So happy to have you here! A special welcome to new subscribers—we’re so glad you’ve joined our village.

In this issue:

A Special Offer for New Subscribers: My Eight-Page List of Small and University Publishers — with links!
On the Farm
Writer’s Life
Book of the Month
Bonus: Writing Prompt

Special Offer

This month, when you subscribe for free to It Takes a Village, I’ll use the email address on your subscription to send you my alphabetized, eight-page list of small and university publishers—with links! It took me weeks to gather this research; why should my loyal subscribers have to reinvent the wheel?

So that existing subscribers don’t feel left out, any of you who want the list can drop a “send me the list too!” in the comments, and I’ll get right on it.

So, enter your email below to get eight pages of publishing info with no fee and no research!

On The Farm

We raise chickens—black and white Barred Rocks; reddish-brown Welsummers; black Australorps; Rhode Island Reds; quick, white Leghorns, and a majestic silver-laced Wyandotte rooster with a fancy tail to die for. One of the things I like best about having chickens, aside from delicious, free eggs, is hearing them lay. Early to mid-mornings, a distinctive cluck-cluck-clucking comes from the coop. This is not the laying chicken. It’s her friends, cheering her on. You go, girl!Once the support clucks stop, I know there’s a fresh egg out in the coop, ready to be gathered.

In the garden, it’s a little different. With vegetables and berries, it’s pretty easy to tell by sight and touch when they’re ready to be picked. The blueberries lose all their green—even that last bit near the stem—growing nearly black, plump, and powdery. Tomatoes give ever so slightly to my touch. Lettuces are ready when they’re large and turn super-alive green or purple, but before they become leathery.

But in the flower garden, it’s all chaos and guesswork. Clumps of daisies crowd the sedum, the echinacea under the cherry tree never quite takes off, the columbine and bleeding hearts are too hot in the slanted afternoon sun despite being under a tree, and the black-eyed Susans think they own the entire bed. I separate and move plants, edge borders, fight back the insistent Creeping Charlie, and constantly rethink my decisions, designs, and methods. I feel I’ll never know what I’m doing, never be done, or if I am done, I won’t recognize it. But then, there are those summer afternoons when I sit on the porch, look out at my creation, and feel satisfied and happy right down to my bones. Tending the flower garden is a lot like writing in that way.

Writer’s Life

I thought for a hot second my memoir was finished. Silly me. I even started trying to get it published. But there was this…niggling. You know, that feeling that something’s not right? I assumed it was a lack of belief in myself, or maybe nervousness about revealing parts of my life and the lives of others that had heretofore been private. I worked on the self-doubt. I hired a lawyer to vet the manuscript for problems with libel. I felt better. But the niggling continued.

Having worked on the manuscript for almost five years, I was too close to see it clearly anymore. At the suggestion of a dear friend, a writer I much admire, I hired her developmental editor. Developmental editors, for those who don’t know, are editors who specialize in the big-picture aspects of the manuscript—basically how the thing holds together.

This editor found the problem, and the moment she articulated it, the niggling transformed into a clearly defined and (I hope) solvable problem. “…you are a literary writer,” she wrote in her evaluation of the manuscript, “and this book shines its brightest when you are telling a captivating story, as beautifully as you possibly can; not when you’re marshaling evidence against a corrupt and broken system.” I had tried to write an issue-driven memoir because I didn’t believe I had the chops to write a literary memoir. But this editor assured me I could write a book “whose joy for the reader is located entirely in the voice of the author and the story being told.” My story is about more than this one issue, it’s more complex than I’d believed myself capable of articulating—wider, richer, and so much more me.

There’s talk ad nauseum about the market and what a debut book ought to be in order to sell. Talk about platform and brand. God, I hate that word. I had let that talk dictate what my book could be. I let the internet cacophony make my book less than my heart wanted it to be.

It’s hard to believe in ourselves as writers. It doesn’t matter how many degrees we get or fancy seminars we attend. Validation so seldom comes. The first time I really believed in my writing was when Robert Atwan and Vivian Gornick selected my essay, “Any Kind of Leaving,” for Best American Essays 2023. With that endorsement, I began inhabiting my writing life differently—not with changed writing habits or goals, but a way of feeling the writing in my bones. But all that “should” talk distracted me, and here I am. I’m having to build another layer of belief in my work, word by word. Working on the manuscript from this new perspective, I feel cellular changes. It’s so interesting to me how we can feel the writing and the trust in it in our bodies. I’m grateful for the niggling, the knowing down deep that the manuscript wasn’t done, and the courage to try again. Here's my best advice: Shut out the “shoulds,” pay attention to your body, and listen for the niggling.

Book of the Month

This month, I was gobsmacked by Jill Christman’s If This Were Fiction, a memoir in essays. It was recommended to me a year ago by the brilliant Dinty W. Moore, and I finally got around to reading it. (My to-be-read pile is a little out of hand.) It’s about love, loss, marriage, family, motherhood, and so much more. Its insights and language are gorgeous. But here’s the main thing: there is so much joy in this book! Even amidst tales of death and abuse and the constant worry for our loved ones and for the world—sounds familiar, right?—these pages nonetheless burst with happiness: with Swedish fish and paste-on googly eyes, with eating wooden fruit and laugh-out-loud silky skirts falling off in public.

One of the essays, entitled “The Avocado,” might be the most beautifully complex essay I’ve ever read. For years, if asked to name my favorite essay, I’d cite Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter,” from her book, The Boys of My Youth. But I have to tell you “The Avocado” is right up there with Beard’s essay. In a little over ten pages, Christman weaves together a trip to Costa Rica, the accident that killed her fiancé, and the birth of her son so that we come away with a stunning, searing account of an entire life, of what it means to be alive in this traumatic and capricious world. I can’t recommend this one enough. It’s just what we need right now.

Bonus: Writing Prompt

Take out a piece of writing you’ve put aside because it’s not working. Ideally, this should be something you’re emotionally connected to, something you really want to communicate, an idea you want to work with, but that isn’t gelling.

Read the piece until you encounter the “niggling” I wrote about earlier in this newsletter. That frustrating thing you can’t quite name, the place where something’s not quite right.

Now put the piece down, close your eyes, and breathe into that niggling feeling. Let it enlarge in your body and inform you. Then, set a timer for at least fifteen minutes, and with pen and paper (rather than keyboard), write about the niggling. Ask it questions. Challenge your original perspective. Be a devil’s advocate. See if you can name the dissonance you’re experiencing. Write into the nooks and crannies where you haven’t been willing to look before. If you feel there’s more to write when the timer goes off, keep going.

At the end of this exercise, you should come away with improved clarity about the nature of the niggling, and maybe even a plan for revision.

It Takes A Village