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When to stop writing

     Hemmingway advised, and I'm paraphrasing here, that the time to stop writing was when you knew what was going to happen next.  I had to Google that.  How I remembered it was to stop writing when you knew the first sentence of what comes next.  I came across that quote a couple of weeks ago and I've held it in my mind as something to practice because that has been the biggest obstacle for me in continuing a larger piece of writing.  I stop when I've completed a section.  It feels like a good place to stop.   I feel satisfied because I can close my notebook or my laptop with the knowledge that I completed something.  The problem comes when I come back to the writing the next day.  I don't know where to go from there.  I don't know how to get back into the flow of what came before.  Inevitably, I set it aside hoping to wake up one day knowing what comes next.

     I am on the final pages of my current notebook and one of my first entries was the Naked in the Hallway bit that I recently posted.  My original first sentence was, "The first person I wanted to come out to was my therapist."  I think I'll put that back in because when I reread it, the first sentence of the next section came to me.  It is, "The first person I actually came out to was....".  Now I know where I'm going next!  I think Hemmingway was onto something here.

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