Let the Writing Take You Where

The only way to free yourself from the fear of writing is to do the writing. The only way to advance the work is to sit with it. Perhaps the hardest part of writing is the book's final quarter. And if you write like I write, which is to say scene by scene and absent an outline, you are writing with no safety net. You have jumped and you are hanging from a bungee cord. You do not know if you have a book until you write its final line.

There's panic bound up in that. There is (but of cours...