Chapter One - Written With No End
Ever since I was a child I have wanted to be a writer. It's the only goal I've ever really had.
I've always lived in my head, scribbled, filled notebooks with nonsense and had clear visions of characters and worlds but never quite found their stories. I was a writer but felt like I was lacking the writing to prove it.Â
When I was Sixteen, I achieved that goal in a measurable sense. I published a fanfiction. I wrote it while feeling like there was a fire burning in me that consumed every waking thought. It was escapism in the realest sense, and at the end of it there was a piece of work that was tangible evidence I was a writer.Â
In the following decade I've been plagued with the worry that maybe that was it for me. Nothing I've tried to write since has consumed me in the way that my fanfiction did, nor has anything been complete enough to attempt publishing in any way. My AO3 handle felt less like a part of me and more like a taunt. âWritten with no endâ was the fate of all my characters trapped inside stories with no completion.Â
I've never stopped wanting to be a writer but a part of me stopped believing I could be. I also never stopped writing. Not ever. At university the free access to Microsoft software was used academically second, and creatively first. After I graduated I filled my Google Docs with more characters and more worlds and more ideas, until my storage was full and I had to pay for more. There are playlists on Spotify dedicated to novels that may never get published and songs that now haunt me because they are privately dedicated to a long abandoned chapter.Â
Poetry provided some fulfilment in this time but so much of it was too raw and real for me to feel capable of publishing. In Noah Kahan's song No Complaints he says âIn love with being noticed, afraid of being seen.â That could be the title of my poetry collection, although most poems would be brutally censored with all feelings redacted.Â
Still, I was a writer. At Twenty Two a small spark was quickly fanned into a flame. It was a fanfiction idea. An alternative universe: what if I took two characters I knew, loved and had already given a happy ending, Louis Tomlinson and Harry Styles, and put them into the world of Formula One. A plan grew. The timeline was built. I painstakingly plotted out the race results of four seasons for twenty drivers. Twenty fictional drivers, that is, racing for ten fictional teams. Some details were taken from other works of mine because this was clearly their home. I had my beginning, my middle and my end, but still something wouldn't fit.Â
It was an unsatisfactory ending that asked more questions than it answered, and there were so many other characters I had met by then and wanted to get to know better, so much so that at points it felt like I had lost Louis and Harry's story.
Work on this story was infrequent. Sometimes I opened the document and thought it was the best thing I had ever written. Sometimes I opened the document and saw the rambling thoughts of a mad woman. What the story never was though, was abandoned. I never closed the document for good. I never wrote the characters off as not worthy of an ending. I just hadnât quite found it yet.Â
I sometimes thought I had taken on too much. The detail I wanted to write was beyond what I as a reader would want to read. As a reader I like pacey stories that were decision heavy and description light. If I wasnât writing a story for me, then who was I writing for?
2026 arrived and so did Twenty Six. Near the start of the year I discussed goals with a friend and told her I wanted to write something. She told me frankly that I should just write it. When a friend says something matter of factly to you that you previously decided was a dream, it suddenly feels manageable. If my friend thinks I can and I should, then of course I can and I should.Â
I had a horror novella I was trying to write that was not fanfiction. Instead it was steeped in my real life experience of working for heritage charities. If I managed it, it would be a piece of writing I would have no shame in putting my real name against and sharing. It had sturdy foundations and I had the plot mapped out, but writing horror had been attractive in theory and frustrating in practice. A lot of the time I didn't want to put my characters through the steps that would lead them to their bleak, inevitable end. A lot of the time I wanted to write optimistic romance, or shameless, indulgent smut.Â
I started to realise that it was the same problem I had with my fanfiction. I hadn't given the characters a happy ending. Their fate was decided and I wasnât going to change it, it was the whole point. Their journey could only ever have that one ending at that one point in time and it told a completed story, but it was uninspiring to write so it would be uninspiring to read. I left my characters in limbo, unwilling to guide them towards their sad end.
Unless, that wasn't the end.Â
In 2025 I read Me And You On Vacation by Emily Henry and I loved it. It played with the timeline by having the lead up to an event and the aftermath of an event interwoven throughout. It kept you guessing while not ruining any suspense, and you gasped when you finally found out what had happened. On the 10th January 2026 I watched the film and this is when fanfiction cogs started turning for me. Slowly. Then all at once.Â
By the 15th January I was sure the original ending for my fanfiction was not the ending, because how could it be? There was always going to be an epilogue but it had been bittersweet. The journeys the characters took afterwards kept them apart and they were never really reunited. But what if they were? Ideas were jotted down in the notes app on my phone and I felt a rush of energy that I hadnât felt in years. In ten years.Â
One day I was lying in the bath and I just knew I had it. Using my original plan as a template I plotted out sixty chapters in one sitting while the water went cold around me. The chapters had a pleasing pattern, the adjacent timelines that had symmetry in their frustration and satisfaction, and there was an ending that answers the questions the original ending had asked. It was all there. It was a tangible story. Beginning, middle, end.Â
This new idea was a rolling stone quickly gathering moss. On the 24th January 2026 three things of significance happened. My close friend got engaged, I watched the first two episodes of Heated Rivalry, and I created a document to begin writing the second version of my story. Love was alive, fandoms were alive, and creativity was alive. I started writing chapter one that day and I have not stopped since. I am over halfway through my first draft and once again, a decade after I last felt it, there is tangible, publishable evidence that I am a writer.
freya, written-with-no-end
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