Shawn Marie Graybeal-Sellers

Shadows was the bones. Anywhere but Here was the lesson. The Space Between Songs is the story, finally told the way it was meant to be.
But the real story starts in the middle. It always does.

I wrote the middle of Jessi’s story while my marriage was ending.
Twenty years. My children’s father. The ground coming out from under everything I had built my life around, and the particular terror of having to figure out who I was when the structure I had lived inside was gone. I did not sit down to write a survival story. I just wrote. I wrote what I understood, which was a woman moving through impossible country alone, making decisions under pressure, getting to the next thing because there was nothing else to do.

The mountain. The cabin. The river. A woman who pulls herself out of the current, finds the bank, and keeps moving because stopping means dying and dying helps no one.

I was writing myself before I knew that was what I was doing.

That middle became Shadows. It was published, sent out into the world, true to exactly where I was when I wrote it. But I knew something was missing. Jessi survived what she needed to survive, but she was not fully herself yet. She was too much of who I was at the time. A woman looking for someone to hold things together. A woman waiting for rescue, even when she was the one still moving forward.

I could not fix that yet. I was not ready. I had not become who she needed to be.

So I wrote Michelle.

Anywhere but Here came before Shadows was even published. I wrote Michelle’s middle first too, the part I understood, the part I was living. When I was ready, when I had come far enough through my own story to understand how it held together, I went back and wrote her beginning and her ending.

Writing Michelle taught me something I didn’t know I needed to learn.

She showed me what it looks like when a woman acts. Decides. Moves through difficulty without waiting for permission or explanation, without needing someone to tell her she is going to be okay. Michelle is guarded in her own way, damaged in her own way, but she is never anything other than the agent of her own story.

I finished Anywhere but Here and understood Jessi for the first time.
Not the Jessi I had written. The Jessi she was always meant to be.

I went back.

The middle was still there. The bones I had always believed in. The story still worked. But I rebuilt everything around it. I gave Jessi a full love story before I asked her to survive anything, because survival only matters when the reader knows what she is fighting to return to. I gave Ryan a life on the page instead of an absence. I gave the loss its weight and the return its meaning.

And I gave Jessi her strength.

Not the strength of someone who has been rescued. The strength of someone who pulls herself out of a river alone, who loads the rifles, who chooses to go to the person she loves because she has decided to go. The strength of someone who has been through the worst of it and come out knowing who she is.

I could write that woman because I had become her.

That is what I didn’t understand when I first wrote the middle of her story in the wreckage of my marriage. The survival was always there on the page. The wholeness had to wait until I found my own.

The pattern is clear to me now.

I write the middle first because the middle is where I am. The hard part. The survival part. The part that requires no faith in outcome because outcome is not visible yet. Then, when I am ready, when I have come far enough through my own story to believe in beginnings and endings, I go back and write the rest.

You can’t write a convincing beginning until you know the character survives. You can’t write a convincing ending until you believe in that kind of resolution yourself.

The middles came first because that is where I was. The beginnings and endings came when I was ready.

Three books. One conversation. The same truth, finally written with clarity.

And if you have ever found yourself in the middle of your own story, still trying to understand how it ends, you are not as lost as you think you are.

The Books Behind This Essay

Anywhere But Here
Available now
A novel about survival, choice, and coming home to yourself.

The Space Between Songs
Coming Fall 2026
A reimagined and fully realized telling of Jessi’s story.

Shadows
Early work, available for a limited time
The original version of this story, written from a place of survival before it was fully understood.