knowing where to stop

Hemingway's trick for wrapping up the day's work

I sat down to write this morning and found the last time I wrote, I’d stopped in an unusual place.

I had been working on a fight between two characters. And just as all stories do, any scene—particularly a fight—has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Any given conversation has a shape and requires the necessary momentum to propel itself through the prope…