In defence of the sentence nobody finishes

I get letters, kind ones mostly, asking why I do this to people. Why, a reader wrote last week, do you let them get all the way to the door and then have someone knock. The honest answer is that I think the knock is the romance, and the door opening would be merely the plot, and I would like to spend a few hundred words trying to talk you round.

We have been sold an idea that the good part of a love story is the declaration. The rooftop. The run through the rain. The line said out loud at last. And those are lovely. I write them, I cry writing them, I am not made of stone. But they are not where the feeling lives. The feeling lives in the twenty pages before, in the restraint, in the two people who both know and neither says, in the hand that moves halfway across the table and then picks up a cup instead, because picking up the cup is safer than the truth. That is the ache I am chasing. The declaration releases the ache. It does not create it.

Think about how it actually feels to want someone you are not sure of. It does not feel like a speech. It feels like editing yourself. It feels like noticing that you have changed what you were going to say three times in one sentence, and the person across from you has noticed too, and now you are both pretending the sentence was always going to end the dull way it ended. The unfinished sentence is not a cruelty I inflict on my characters to torment my readers. It is the single most accurate thing I know how to put on a page about what it is to be on the edge of loving somebody.

And restraint is generous, which nobody ever says. When a character holds back, she is making room for the reader to lean in. The gap where the confession should be is a gap you fill with your own, every almost you have ever lived through, every door you got to and did not walk through, or walked through too late, or walked through at exactly the right moment and have been grateful for ever since. If I write the whole thing out, if I close every gap and finish every sentence, there is nothing left for you to put yourself into. A love story that explains itself completely is a love story with no room left for the person reading it.

So yes, I will keep doing it. I will keep having someone knock at the worst possible moment. I will keep ending the chapter on the half look, the not quite, the breath taken and not used. Not because I enjoy your suffering, though a little, I will admit, I do. But because the moment before is the true moment, and I would rather hand you that than the tidy thing that comes after. The run through the rain is a reward. The ache is the love. And I am, at the end of the day, far more interested in writing love than in writing rewards.

Unfinished things carry a love story of their own in The Unfinished Cloth, set in a high valley that once wove its whole history into one long cloth.