Unfinished

One story has been sitting in my drafts folder for almost six years. I kept opening and closing it, but nothing was really coming to me. It began with a character I couldn't shake or forget about: a man returning to his hometown after receiving a voicemail from his estranged sister, only to discover the sister disappeared the same day the message was sent. All his relationships are strained in someway or another.

The premise arrived fully formed. The story did not. I kept deleting paragraphs, sentences, and coming back to it and writing something else, but yet that man was still there trying to figure where his sister had gone.

I wrote nearly 50 pages before realizing I was circling the same mystery without getting closer to its center. Every version: 2.0, 2.5, 3.0 ran into the same problem. The disappearance was never the real subject. The real subject was the relationship between the siblings, but I never had first hand experience in that and I couldn't find a structure that allowed both things to matter equally, hence the deleting and recreating. It feels like I am going in circles, yet that main male lead still remains in my mind wanting to be drawn into the book. I also did not want the characters to be disappointing as well.

When I leaned into the mystery, the emotional core flattened. The siblings became clues rather than people. When I focused on their history, the plot lost momentum and the disappearance felt like an excuse to revisit old wounds. The story kept pulling in two directions, and neither side was strong enough to carry the other, plus the addition of fantasy adds another imperfect layer creating a mess.

The unfinished draft is filled with scenes I still like. A tense dinner with their aging mother. A forgotten baseball field overtaken by weeds and tall grasses. The male main character is listening to the voicemail over and over, convinced there is something hidden in the pauses or in the background noises. Almost reminding me of a Lucy Foley novel, where the story starts slow, but the pace quickens the more you read. Individually, those moments work. Together, they never become a complete shape. It's almost like reading two novels at the same time. Ms. Foley is a master at doing both and I wanted my work to reflect hers, but without completely copying her, yet I managed to get lost between the scenes.

I still don't know whose story it is. The sister who vanished is absent from most of the narrative, yet she exerts the strongest pull as the readers learn more about her. The brother who returns is present in every chapter, yet often feels like a witness rather than a protagonist. The novel needs a center of gravity, and I've never found it.

Another part is harder to define. Every attempt to finish it feels slightly dishonest. Almost like reading a romantic comedy where everything ends happily ever after or a shakespearen comedy where it turns out maybe the sister was never missing, but sent her brother on a fool's errand. Maybe someone should die? But that's too much like Lucy Foley. The story asks questions about forgiveness, obligation, and family history that I don't have answers to myself and I am trying to tie it fantasy making the characters into vampires or werewolves. Whenever I approach an ending, it starts to feel too well manicured, as though I'm resolving tensions that should remain unresolved, to remain more real, but would it also make a great series that one day would be shown on television in the flesh rather than just a fictional mind piece.

So the manuscript remains suspended between versions. Not abandoned, exactly. More like waiting, waiting for something a little more dicey or mysterious. I just cannot figure out what it needs.

"All endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time." — Mitch Albom