A Writing Tip by Moriah Hampton
When Willpower Isn’t Enough

Recently, I set aside a story I’d been working on for over a year. I did so reluctantly after revising the opening section to build to certain plot points I selected from earlier drafts. The more I revised, the more dissatisfied I became. It was like watching dominoes lined up between two walls topple over one by one. Despite knowing that something prevented the story moving forward in an interesting way, I continued to revise. I have goals, I told myself. Six stories into the collection I want to publish someday, I anticipated completing the seventh story I was revising and starting on the eighth, my momentum steady until the project was complete. Writing takes work, I reminded myself, which entails not quitting when it becomes difficult but pushing through whatever obstacle lies in the way. But sometimes will power isn’t enough. Sometimes a story requires less of us, not more, in order to be told. That story does not await fully formed in another realm in a Platonic sense but rather, necessitates that I become the right person to tell it. So I set it aside, acknowledging that I may never be that person. If and when that time comes, I occupy the space between what is and what will be fashioning myself through the stories I tell further into existence.

Moriah Hampton received her PhD in Modernist Literature from SUNY-Buffalo. Her fiction, poetry, and photography have appeared in Entropy, Rune Literary Collection, Hamilton Stone Review, The Sonder Review, and elsewhere. She currently teaches in the Writing and Critical Inquiry Program at SUNY-Albany. Visit her bio page here. 

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