The sentence I leave unfinished on purpose

It is a quarter past nine, the writing is finally going somewhere, and that is exactly why I put the cap back on the pen.

For a long time this would have felt like a crime. You wait all day for the work to catch, for a paragraph to stop being sand and start being something you can pick up, and then, the moment it does, you walk away? Every instinct I was ever handed says keep going, ride it, the muse is a bus that does not come twice.

I have learnt that the bus does come twice. The trick is simply where you leave the bookmark.

I started doing this by accident. One evening the phone rang in the middle of a sentence, a real sentence, one I liked, and I had to go. I was cross about it for an hour. The next morning I sat down dreading the cold start we all dread, the blank page that asks you to be clever before you have even had your coffee. Except the page was not blank. There was my half a sentence, still warm, still obviously heading somewhere, and finishing it took no courage at all. By the time it was done I was already moving. The hardest part of the day, the getting in, had been done for me the night before by a version of me who had not even meant to be kind.

So now I do it on purpose. I stop while it is going well. I leave the sentence open like a door on the latch.

A blank page is frightening. A page with one unfinished thought on it is an invitation.

There is nothing mystical in this. It is only that we are far better at continuing than at beginning. Beginning asks you to decide, to commit, to be worth the chair. Continuing asks you to keep walking in a direction you have already chosen. If you spend your small daily store of courage finishing a piece of work into the ground every night, you have nothing left for the door the next morning, and the door is where the real cost always is.

People tell me they have no time to write. Often what they mean is that they do not have the half hour of warming up they believe the work demands. This is the quiet gift of the latched door. You skip the warming up, because you are not starting, you are resuming. Ten honest minutes on a sentence you already trust will carry you further than an hour spent staring and bargaining with yourself.

It works for more than writing. I leave the washing up with the last three easy things still to do. I stop a walk at the top of the hill rather than trudging home empty. I close a good book one page before the chapter ends. Each time, the next session has a handle on it, somewhere to take hold.

So if tonight is going well, I would gently suggest you stop before it stops on its own. Put something down while you still want to say it. Tomorrow, when you are tired and unconvinced and quite sure you have nothing in you, there it will be: your own handwriting, already pointing the way, asking only that you take one more step.

Leaving work warm is one way to keep an idea alive, and A Field Guide to Ideas is a playful guide to noticing, capturing and developing ideas without frightening them away.