If you find that you start a number of stories or pieces that you don’t ever bother finishing, that you lose interest or faith in them along the way, it may be that there is nothing at their center about which you care passionately. You need to put yourself at their center, you and what you believe to be true or right. The core, ethical concepts in which you most passionately believe are the language in which you are writing. -- Anne Lamott
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📖 Notes & analysis
The reason this works is structural, not emotional. A story without a conviction at its core has no compass, so every scene feels equally arbitrary, and arbitrary things are easy to abandon. Belief gives you a reason to choose one sentence over another.
Say you keep stalling on a story about a family selling their house. If you don't actually care, try locating what you believe about it before writing further, maybe that people are more forgivable than their worst year. Suddenly every conversation reveals or tests that idea, and you know what to cut.
The caution: don't let belief calcify into a lesson. Readers can feel when a story is proving a point rather than discovering one. Hold your conviction loosely enough that the characters might complicate it.
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