This isn’t my idea, but I’m stealing it from a colleague. For the first 15-20 minutes of his writing session, he gives himself the grace to finish up whatever he was obsessing about but clearly needs to move on from. For the last two times we met, I’ve seen it in his eyes and demeanor—it really works!

On the subject of permission, if you have a guess that something might work, I encourage you to experiment with it. Of late, I’ve been stuck between wanting to create more words while still unsure of where those words should go. In the back of my mind, I knew I needed to spend some of my writing time going back to my outline and figuring out where I was. Giving myself permission to move back and forth between the outline, even while I was supposed to be writing, proved very helpful. I can’t say it wasn’t my colleague above who planted the seed in my mind. Today I celebrate writing a paragraph that I sort of like.

That said, nothing works forever. Change is a predictable constant. If you don’t believe it, hang around people who write—especially the folks who claim to like it—and listen to what they say about writing. Yes, there are a few unicorns, but even unicorns have stuff to figure out. Having a sense of humor about it—just a little laughter to shrug off the cold, death grip of reality that ten years of my life have evaporated into thousands of words of discombobulated text that I’m unsure will constitute a single chapter or coherent argument—has helped some. In an epic this long, the journey has to become as meaningful as the finish line.

Like Odysseus, we strap ourselves to the mast and pray that the song of the sirens—however wretchedly, eardrum piercingly, tinnitus causingly and obnoxiously loud it may be—does not render us before reaching home.

And someday perhaps, when we chill out a little, maybe, just maybe the excruciating torment of writing will give way to steady increments of joy.