Give me a reason: why a lifetime of ‘wanting to’ is not enough to make me finish a story.

I’ve wanted to write a story my whole adult life. If only wanting was enough. My brain is addicted to narratives to the point that I sometimes care more about other peoples’ stories than I do my own. There is always a moment—usually during my withdrawal phase when a story ends—where a narrative world feels bigger and more compelling than my real one.

Every time I sit down to write the same thing happens: my brain stops me to ask why… “why are you writing this story?” My answers must have been unconvincing because my past is littered with half written tales.

Stories saved me as a teen, probably. I mean, in hindsight, things were never that bad, but at the time it felt like I spent most of those years living within a book on the outskirts of reality. For that reason it seemed natural at first that I would try to write a YA fantasy. I had this sense that doing  so would be like paying it forward to the next troubled youth. Then I got distracted by being 19—so many bad decisions waiting to be made.

It wasn’t until I went to university that I really engaged with the version of myself that could be a writer. The thing that pushed me forward? Praise. I wrote a short story and one of my lecturers loved it. I liked feeling special so there was my reason: write for recognition. But the desire for praise wasn’t enough to finish anything longer than a few thousand words. My short stories had a habit of trailing off weakly. I dreamed of winning the Booker like Eleanor Catton, but the effort of writing something that might appeal did not appeal to me. I have a lot of pretentious first chapters for fundamentally boring novels about mental health and the modern malaise.

I took a paper that talked about stories as a form of play. I read philosophers who said stories made order from chaos. They made meaning. So I tried to write a novel that made sense of the world—but what was the point in trying to make sense of something senseless? I stopped again.

I took another paper that explored how the process of consuming stories changes with the medium of consumption. I became obsessed with the idea of writing a transmedia narrative that I would litter across the internet. I’d tell it through social media pages and blogs and YouTube comments and the hyperlinks in between. I wrote a short story testing this concept. My tutor, whom I revered, said I was “the best writer” she’d read “in years”, and that I should do my masters. I got a job answering phones and writing shitty copy for a daily deals site instead.

After university I worked in media and all my stories had a purpose. To change behaviour. To send someone to this restaurant or this play. To make someone buy something. It was disguised as a public good, but it was just marketing. I remember blogging about a café early on in my career, writing something poetic and heartfelt about contemporary 3rd places in urban environments – no longer churches or post offices, but cafes. I was blind to my own privilege, naturally, but a few days later I noticed a traffic spike to the blog from an unknown source and found a critique of my review. A hit job. It denigrated my ‘PR fluff’. It said I was celebrating the gentrification of Auckland’s suburbs and I was a harbinger for the death of culture. I was crushed. I didn’t really know what PR was, then. I only knew how to be genuine. I had no clue I was selling something.

My brother-in-law is an academic and writer. He published a book a decade ago and he’s given me the most useful piece of advice to date. “Don’t write for an imagined audience because there probably won’t be one. Write for yourself. Writing is hard and takes a long time, and if you’re not enjoying it, it’s going to be unbearable.” After that, I thought for a while I’d write about Te Ao Maori: atone for the sins of my colonial ancestors and make my indigenous tipuna proud by sharing the culture I lost four generations ago. Those drafts felt like appropriation—like the story wasn’t mine to tell. I questioned my motives, felt the rumblings of cognitive dissonance. Stopped again.  

Now I’m nearly 40 and a part of me thinks I’ll never make it happen. I’ll continue to write hundreds of first pages and not a single last page. I had a long conversation with ChatGPT about this and it suggested the reason I can’t finish a single story is because I’ve internalised the wanting. The desire to write a novel is so central to my identity at this point that finishing one would cause some kind of personality disintegration. But what does an LLM know, really?   

In the past 18 months I’ve been feeling like I’m getting closer to uncovering the story. The one I must tell. The story that’s both deeply entertaining to me and intellectually engaging enough that I have a hope of finishing it. I’ve actually written about 30,000 words of something—my most promising effort thus far—but there is still a barrier in the way and I think I’ve figured out what it is.

I need my story to be true and I need it to be told in real time.

I don’t want to add another narrative to the world that helps someone disassociate from reality. I want to write something that makes a reader feel like magic is within reach.

So now I’m on the hunt for a likely narrative. No corner of my life is safe.