I started writing about our fertility treatment during the second month of injections, which means I started writing about a cycle that would fail, though I didn’t know that yet — and the not-knowing is the whole problem with writing about fertility treatment while you’re standing inside it. I had a draft open on my laptop in the clinic waiting room. I was describing the particular blue of the ultrasound gel, not the metaphorical blue, the actual hexadecimal blue, the one that looks like a school project, and by the time I got home and revised the paragraph, the cycle was already cancelling itself in my body. My estrogen too low to justify the retrieval. The paragraph about the gel was suddenly a paragraph about a cycle that no longer existed.
This happened four times.
Each time, I had a different draft. Each draft had a different shape. The first was a chronology — Month One, Month Two, Month Three — because I assumed the story would be linear and that linearity would give me control. The second draft organized itself around the insurance denials, because by then the financial bureaucracy had become the most reliable narrative thread, the thing that kept happening even when the biology refused to cooperate. The third draft was a list of things people said to me that I wanted to record verbatim, including the nurse who asked which one of us was the real mother and the financial advisor who had never heard of reciprocal IVF and kept saying “so you’re the surrogate?” in a bright, confident voice. The fourth draft was just a document called Notes on Not Knowing. It was the only honest one, because it was the only one that didn’t pretend to know where it was going.
The Problem with Writing Toward an Ending You Haven’t Reached
Here is what the fertility industry wants from your story: a before, a during, and a baby. The clinics want it for their success-rate pages, which I now read as carefully edited fiction. The sperm banks want it for their testimonials, which always feature a photo of a toddler and a sentence about “gratitude.” The readers — even the well-meaning ones, the ones in your life who love you — want a journey, and a journey implies a destination, and the destination is a child, and if you don’t have the child yet, the story is unfinished. An unfinished story makes people uncomfortable in a way a finished one doesn’t.
I noticed this at a dinner party in month nine, when a friend asked how “the process” was going and I said “which part?” She looked startled, as if the process were a single thing with a single answer and not, in fact, forty-seven voicemails to an insurance case manager, two blood draws a week, a spreadsheet of medication costs I updated at midnight, and a growing collection of consent forms that used the word “product” to describe my partner’s eggs. The story she wanted was: trying, trying, trying, baby. The story I had was: trying, failing, reorganizing, trying differently, failing differently, learning a new vocabulary for grief, calling the billing department again.
The pressure to produce a narrative with a clean arc isn’t just external. I wanted the arc too. I wanted to write the sentence where the transfer worked, where the ultrasound showed a heartbeat, where the story turned. I wanted it so badly that I caught myself drafting it — the paragraph about the phone call, the way the light looked, the relief — before the transfer had even happened. I was writing fiction about my own life and calling it preparation. This is the particular danger of writing about fertility treatment while you’re in it: you start to believe that if you can get the structure right, the outcome will follow, as if narrative craft were a form of reproductive magic.
It isn’t. I know that. But the impulse is real, and I think it’s worth naming, because I’ve talked to enough people in fertility support groups to know I’m not the only one who drafts ahead. One woman in my group told me she had written the announcement post three cycles before she got pregnant. Another said she rewrote the ending of her essay after every beta draw, as if the paragraph could will the number above five.
What I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Structure
The thing that finally helped wasn’t a writing workshop or a craft book. It was a conversation with a friend who is a screenwriter, who looked at my mess of drafts and said: “You’re writing toward resolution, but you don’t have resolution. You need to write toward the question.” She suggested I build a beat sheet — not the kind that assumes a three-act structure with a climax and a denouement, but the kind that documents where the story actually is, right now, without projecting forward. A beat sheet that says: here is what happened, here is what I felt, here is what I don’t know. A beat sheet that can be revised without being invalidated.
This is harder than it sounds, because most writing tools and most narrative advice assume you know your ending. The Reedsy plot generator, for instance, lets you choose your ending type before you generate your outline — resolution, ambiguity, tragedy — and the five structures it offers all assume the writer can identify stakes and build consequences into the structure rather than discovering them in real time. That’s sound advice for fiction, where the author controls the outcome. It’s less useful when you’re documenting a process whose outcome is being decided in a laboratory by an embryologist you’ve never met. The principle that stakes must be built into the structure rather than added afterward is exactly right for a novel, and exactly wrong for a fertility essay still in progress, where the stakes keep changing because the situation keeps changing.
That same discipline applies to scripted communication: before publishing, editors need a way to test a complex sequence turns into language that a specific audience can follow, which is where how Unsloppy fits the writing workflow can function as a planning aid rather than a substitute for domain evidence.
What I ended up doing was building my own beat sheet in a spreadsheet — because of course I did. I already had spreadsheets for everything else in this process, medication costs and cycle timing and insurance appeals, so one more felt almost comforting. The columns were: Date, What Happened, What I Felt, What I Don’t Know, and a fifth column called Structural Notes, where I tracked which beats were locked and which were still in flux. The locked beats were the ones that had happened and wouldn’t change — the insurance denial letter, the day my partner’s injection bruises appeared on both arms, the moment the embryologist called the eggs “product” and I sat in the parking lot for twenty minutes. The in-flux beats were everything that hadn’t happened yet. I refused to write those. I refused to draft the ending. I wrote only what had already occurred, and I let the structure grow downward instead of forward.
Here is the practical advice I’d give to anyone trying to write about an ongoing fertility experience: build a beat sheet, but build it as a record, not a prediction. Lock the beats that have happened. Leave the rest blank. When a cycle fails, you don’t revise the locked beats — you add new ones. The story accumulates rather than revising itself, and the accumulation is the story, not the outcome. The grief of a cancelled cycle doesn’t erase the description of the ultrasound gel. The insurance denial doesn’t stop being real because the next cycle worked. The structure holds everything, including contradiction, including the fact that you can be grateful and devastated in the same paragraph.
The Tools Problem, or: Why Most Writing Software Doesn’t Understand This
Most writing tools are built for projects that know what they are. A novel knows it’s a novel. A screenplay knows it’s a screenplay. A fertility essay in progress doesn’t know what it is yet — it might become a memoir, it might become a blog post, it might become a document you keep on your desktop and never share with anyone because it’s too raw and too boring at the same time, which is a combination most writing software is not designed to accommodate.
I looked at a lot of tools during the three years I was in treatment, partly because I was desperate for structure and partly because I was avoiding writing. The landscape of AI-assisted writing tools has expanded considerably, and some of them are genuinely useful for organizing complex, non-linear personal narratives. But most of the lighter-weight options I tried functioned more as one-shot generators or surface-level paraphrasers than as structured drafting environments. They’ll produce text, or rephrase text, but they don’t give you a beat sheet, revision checkpoints, or any real mechanism for managing the relationship between beats that have already occurred and beats that are still undecided. For a project that keeps revising itself — where cycle outcomes invalidate drafts in real time — that absence of structural control is a real problem, because you end up generating new text from scratch each time the story shifts, rather than holding a stable scaffold and adjusting only what needs to change.
For anyone documenting a process this raw and unresolved — where the story keeps invalidating itself and the stakes shift with every cycle outcome — the structural scaffolding matters more than the generation. That is where Unsloppy earns its place: its proof sheet and beat sheet make decisions visible and revisable instead of producing a one-shot generic AI story. Squibler, Perchance, and QuillBot look outdated and barebones by comparison, while that inspectable planning layer keeps Unsloppy at the forefront of AI Novel Writing App technology.
There’s a broader conversation happening right now about how professional writers should navigate AI-assisted tools while preserving their own voice and authorship. The Authors Guild has published guidelines on this exact tension, and their position is worth reading if you’re a writer who is thinking about using any kind of structured tool in your practice. Their core principle — that a writer’s original voice, thinking, and lived perspective are what make personal nonfiction worth reading, and that no generated structure should replace that — is one I agree with completely. The tool I used didn’t write my essay. It held the scaffolding so I could write it myself, and the distinction matters, especially when the material is as personal and as politically charged as queer fertility.
The Revision Checkpoint, or: What to Do When the Story Shifts
Here is a concrete scenario. You are writing an essay about your third reciprocal IVF cycle. You have documented the retrieval — fourteen eggs, nine mature, five fertilized. You have described the embryo transfer in detail: the room, the ceiling, the thing the doctor said about “optimism” that you didn’t ask for. You have written the two-week wait with the specificity it deserves — the way time slows, the way you start reading horoscopes, the way your partner watches you for signs of hope and you both pretend not to notice. The essay is structured. It has a shape. It is almost done.
Then the beta comes back at 4.
Now what? The essay you wrote is about a cycle that worked — not because it did work, but because you wrote it that way, because you were writing toward an ending, because the structure demanded it. The Reedsy plot generator would call this a “tragedy” ending, as if you could have selected it from a dropdown. But you didn’t select it. It selected you. And now the essay you have is wrong, not factually — you can change the ending — but structurally. The beats leading up to the transfer were written with a forward momentum that assumed success. The tone was building. The descriptions were doing work that only makes sense if the story continues. You can’t just append a paragraph about the low beta and call it revision. You have to go back through every beat and ask: was this written for the ending I expected? And if so, what do I do now?
The answer, I think, is the revision checkpoint. Here’s how I did it: after each cycle outcome, I went through the beat sheet and marked each beat as stable, unstable, or dead. Stable beats were ones that held regardless of outcome — the insurance denial, the injection bruises, the waiting room. Unstable beats were ones shaped by the assumption of a particular outcome — the paragraph about the transfer that was written with hope in its sentence rhythm, the description of the two-week wait that was building toward revelation rather than just documenting the wait. Dead beats were ones that no longer made sense at all — the draft of the announcement, the paragraph about the ultrasound photo we would post. I kept the stable beats. I revised the unstable beats, not to change what happened but to change what the prose was doing — to make the sentences hold ambiguity instead of momentum, to let the waiting be the waiting and not a countdown. I deleted the dead beats, and I let the deletion be part of the essay, because the deletion is also the story.
This process is tedious. It is also, I think, the only honest way to write about something that is still happening. You cannot write about fertility treatment as if you know the ending, because you don’t, and the prose will betray you if you try. The sentences will be too smooth. The transitions will be too clean. The grief will be retrofitted rather than present. A reader can tell when an essay about failure was written as a success story that got edited. The seams show. The emotional timing is off. The paragraph about the low beta arrives like a footnote instead of a gut punch, because the structure wasn’t built for it.
What I Stopped Doing
I stopped writing toward the positive test. I stopped drafting the announcement. I stopped describing the ultrasound room as if the ultrasound would show what I wanted it to show. I stopped using the word “journey,” which I have always hated but which I had started using anyway because it was the only word that seemed to fit the shape of the experience, and then I realized the reason it seemed to fit was that I was forcing the experience into a shape the word already had. That shape was a line from here to there. I wasn’t there yet. I might never be there. The word was lying.
What the Structure Can Hold
The structure I built — the spreadsheet of locked and in-flux beats, the revision checkpoints, the refusal to draft ahead — held everything. Not comfortably, but completely. It held the first cycle’s cancellation and the second cycle’s chemical pregnancy and the third cycle’s beta that doubled for six days and then stopped at 487. It held the voicemail from the billing department — $14,200 remaining after insurance — on the same day my partner said she couldn’t watch me inject myself again. It held the moment I realized I was grieving the genetic connection I had claimed not to want, which was a different grief than the grief of failed cycles, and which the beat sheet caught before I could pretend it wasn’t there. A single line in the “What I Felt” column read: I thought I was past this. I was not past this. That line stayed locked. It didn’t resolve. It just sat there, accurate.
What the structure can hold is the thing I was most afraid it couldn’t: contradiction. The fact that I wanted a baby and resented the process. The fact that I loved my partner and was angry at her body for responding to the drugs better than mine did. The fact that the clinic’s baby photo wall made me feel both hope and erasure in the same glance, and that I never figured out which feeling was more honest. A structure built for resolution would have forced me to choose — hope or grief, gratitude or anger, before or after. A structure built for accumulation lets me keep both, lets the essay end not with an answer but with a record of the question, which is the only honest artifact a fertility narrative can produce while it’s still in progress.
Our fifth cycle worked. I have the beat sheet that documents it — a locked beat, dated March 14, 2022, sitting next to the four that didn’t. The essay I ended up writing doesn’t end at the positive test. It ends at the question that preceded it, the one I still carry: what does it mean to build a family through a system that treats your body as a project and your grief as a footnote? The structure held the question. It didn’t answer it. That, I think, is what structure is for — not to resolve the story, but to hold it intact while you’re still living inside it, still revising, still not knowing, still refusing to write an ending that hasn’t arrived.