The Audience Comes After the Work

There is a strange moment that happens after you finish writing something.

You have spent months, maybe years, alone with the work. You have written it in coffee shops and hotel rooms, in the margins of other responsibilities, late at night when you should have been sleeping. You have rewritten it until the words no longer look like words. You have edited it, doubted it, loved it, hated it, and eventually—if you are lucky—you have reached the terrifying point where you have to let it leave you.

And then you realize something no one really tells you:

Finishing the writing is only the beginning.

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