Finishing Lines: completing work by the force of your will

by Ellen Santasiero | January 2, 2026

When I arrived at graduate school, the director of my MFA program bid us new students to file into an old-fashion classroom with tiered seating; the seats were the wooden ones with that paddle-shaped desk thing issuing from the right side. Outside the windows, the wind spun snow against a navy sky while our take-no-prisoners director chalked on the blackboard, “Always Be Closing.” The phrase comes from a scene in David Mamet’s film Glengarry Glen Ross, where boss Alec Baldwin verbally abuses his real estate agents for their dismal sales. Our director was trying to scare us straight, especially those of us unable to finish the writing we started.

“Always Be Closing,” commanded blue-eyed Baldwin, and so did our director who had either rued his own unfinished works, or who anticipated how to justify the value of the MFA program before a fusty Board of Directors and whose case would more favorably fly if he showed that his graduates could in fact “close,” i.e. publish. For there can be no publication until a piece is finished, at least to a certain degree.

I, for one, was busted. I had much to learn and improve on, but finishing my pieces probably topped the list.

In a recent Forge class, we discussed “Always Be Closing,” and some strategies that help writers finish. One was to write a “hermit crab” piece in which the writer fits their story, or content, into a pre-existing non-literary form such as a resume, sermon, or recipe. The idea is that the pre-existing form is already finished; you just follow its contours by pouring your content into it. Think ribbons of cold cake batter unfurling into a Bundt pan. Take it out of the oven, and voila! you have a finished piece!

The resulting draft may not be felicitous, it may not be edit-ready, but the exercise gives the writer a feel for an ending, a sense of how a piece might finally turn and lay down to rest.

Other ways to learn how to finish are less prescriptive. My esteemed Forge colleague Irene Cooper asks her students, “When can, or does, process include product?” which is a wonderful head fake. The question assumes that process is the main thing going on at the writer’s desk (which it is) and that product, or publication, might be an afterthought. Ha ha.

I tried a less prescriptive technique recently after I attended a webinar by a local literary luminary (yes, we Forge instructors continue to take classes ourselves) who urged us to “Write With Intention.” This means to choose a home for your writing (a publication you like), write to that place’s specifications, and commit to a deadline for submission.

(Why, you might be thinking, such an emphasis on publication? To that, I say, why not? Many writers want to wield this type of currency in the literary world. Besides, even the rejections—which will come—signals to your writer’s soul that you are serious about this business.)

After listening to the local luminary, I pulled out an essay I’d been picking at for a couple of years, one that I’d actually wanted to appear in an online journal I admired. This journal publishes personal essays that discuss works of art and works of literature in conversation with one other, a subject that has long fascinated me. My essay about a contemporary photograph and an early twentieth century novel, for which I had already inked many, many paragraphs, was about time and rocks and, ultimately, my divorce. After many drafts, I still could not figure out how to end the piece.

Newly energized, I checked the journal’s web site: the next deadline was in four months. Over the ensuing weeks, I settled on the one thing I wanted to say in the piece, made some more revisions, and wrote a good-enough conclusion. It was mid-November, the sky a dark berry, and the stars were just coming out when I hit send. One month and two days later, I received an email acceptance.

This story has everything to do with figuring out what I really wanted to say, revision, persistence, and letting go. But today, it’s also about committing to “Writing With Intention,” which included a deadline. I simply promised myself that I would submit it on that date, and that meant, to the best of my ability, I would make the piece turn and lay it down to rest.

Dipping a Toe into Workshopping

by Mike Cooper

We’re finishing up the generative phase of The Forge 2025-26. Our Smithys are freewriting to music, then organizing and revising and sharing with their peers for feedback and revision. We’ve given each other some feedback so far, especially in our discussions on the Discord channels, and now we’ll dip our toes into the process of workshopping.

And why workshop?

Hemingway said, “The only writing is rewriting.”

John Updike said, “Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.”

E.B. White said, “The best writing is rewriting.”

Dorothy Parker said, “I would write a book or a short story, at least three times—once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.”

Roald Dahl said, “Good writing is essentially rewriting. I am positive of this.”

Workshopping is an important step in the rewriting/revising/editing process. We generally know what we mean when we write something down. We understand all the thoughts and feelings that our characters have because we are who we are—we project all our life experiences onto the page, whether we fully understand them or not. We know what it felt like when Aunt Marge squoze our faces into her ample breasts at Thanksgiving, and that later we would be an accomplice in getting Auntie Marge a little more of the brown liquid from the bottle with the picture of the turkey on the front—which smelled a lot like her perfume—and that it would be “our little secret,” and how we were thrilled and frightened by “breaking the rules” and how our illicit collusion made us feel “grown up.” But if we just say, “I/he/she/they got Aunt Marge some more bourbon,” our reader doesn’t get the full nuance of the moment—and how it has/will affect our character’s thoughts and decisions.

So our readers are there to give us feedback. Feedback is saying, “This is what I see. Is that what you meant?” And we either say “Yes” or “Sort of” or “No, not at all,” and we go back to the page to clarify our intention.

Another great aspect of workshopping is that we get to apply our critical analysis skills to other people’s work. And in doing that, we can’t help but compare it to our own work. We therefore learn to avoid areas that we find don’t work so well in our peers’ writing, and to apply the things that we think do work well to our own work.

Let's Get Cracking with Metaphor

Irene Cooper | November 4, 2025

But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.

                                                                   Aristotle, "Poetics," 1459a 3-8, via etymonline.com  

No shade to Aristotle, but I have to question the master’s definitiveness. (Also, his attachment to so-called ‘genius,’ which many a working writer understands to be less useful to her writing than plain persistence—but that’s another blog for another time.)

I have no quibble with describing metaphor as an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars. That’s money. It is, too, the focus of week three at The Forge creative writing program—how a curious and masterful use of metaphor can make one’s writing sing, and why this kind of resonance isn’t just for the poets.

Common Ground, Creative Tension

Years ago, in a workshop focused on imagery, the instructor asked us students to go deep with our observations of the world, to find meaning—or more precisely, feeling—in material and movement. A writer in our cohort wound up comparing a heartbreak to the cracking of an egg three rooms away—nearly unhearable, profoundly irreversible. A heart is not an egg. (Heck, the valved and bloody heart is not even the heart of heartbreak.) In comparing what is dissimilar, however, the writer brought to our attention what is—or could be, if we let it—common to a heart and an egg, and oh, so poignantly. (I’m still a little mad about how good that metaphor was.)

In literary and working writer discussions of metaphor, the energy that comes from this combination of similar and dissimilar is called ground and tension. Like the notion of superposition in quantum physics, it’s easier to let it wash over your brain than to try to pin it down. Here’s the thing: the body gets it. The comparison doesn’t require perfect symmetry to thrum. When we students collectively gasped at the notion of the distant cracking of an egg, it was our bodies that responded—to the sound, faint as faint can be, and to the mind’s eye image of the broken perfection of the shell, never to be the same. The ground: the egg and the (already metaphorical) heart as vulnerable vessels; the tension: the heart, unlike the egg, will, in all likelihood, recover.

Breaking Down the Big Ideas into Piquant Canapés of Feeling

Why compare at all? Well, as we (me, sometimes) say at The Forge, we turn to metaphor because Abstractions Are Often a Big Unmarked Rubbermaid Bin Taking Up Space in Your Text, Holding the Things You Really Want to Say. Metaphor in creative writing helps the mind make sense of the body by speaking directly through the senses. Sure, we can write, “The old man was lonely after his wife died,” and we will have said it in way that can be understood. Or, we can say “The man let out a little moan each time he opened the closet door and heard the hollow clacking of the empty hangers on his wife’s side,” and readers will have felt lonely in their bones (specifically those tiny bones in their mind’s ear, where those clacking hangers will continue to echo).

I’ll be eager in the coming week to talk about how the homework went, as it includes a close read of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Left Omelas,” and an assignment to write an original allegory—an extended metaphor, or as I like to think of it, a metaphor with a mandate. Nobody knew better than Le Guin: you’ve got to break a few eggs to make an Omelas.