About a month and a half ago, inspired by a picture, I wrote a rough draft of a short story. About 2,300 words long, it had a nice beginning, a muddled middle, and an abrupt non-ending. I saved the story and closed the file. The story and I needed space from each other.

So, I wrote some blogs. I did minor revisions on a historical short story. I beta read a novel. I read some books. I played games with my grandchildren. I walked my dog. I watched TV. I cleaned the house.

That’s usually how it is for me at the beginning of a short-story relationship. I fall in love with an idea, which lives in my mind. I see a story with layered meaning, engaging characters, and a compelling plot. However, the vision in my head becomes incomplete and fragmented on the paper. Something gets lost in translation, and at this point, I’m never sure if I will ever meet the story I became infatuated with. It’s rare that a story and I click right away, so in the beginning, I often don’t name a story, just in case things don’t work out.

For a while, a rough draft and I will ignore each other. Then, if it’s meant to be, the story starts whispering in a corner of my mind. It nudges me when I’m drifting off to sleep. Before I open my eyes in the morning, I feel it staring at me. At this point, it’s all low-level noise. But if the story cares, it keeps calling to me, getting louder and louder, until the only way I can pacify it is to pull it up on my computer screen and spend time with it. My inspired-by-a-photo story is one of those types of stories — one that starts to follow me around.

So, last Saturday morning I returned to the story and spent hours with it. When I took my dog for a walk in the afternoon, I called a friend, who also writes. “I’m working on a story I started six weeks ago,” I told her. “It’s been painful.”

“It hurts?” she asked. I imagined her eyebrows pitching upward along with the sound of her voice.

“Yes,” I said, “I’m at the beginning stages of writing the story. I don’t know if it’s going to work or not, and that’s painful. If I can make the story work, then the revising and editing parts become fun.”

The painful phase happens almost every time I write a short story. My head spins. I crave chocolate. I check my email every five minutes. And I make excuses to leave my desk. But I’ve learned the only thing I can do is to keep returning to my story, to keep pushing forward. Sometimes after months of intermittently returning to a story again and again — trying to find a way into it, through it, or out of it — I get lucky, and my story seems to write itself. But this isn’t really true: It’s the time and work I’ve put in that suddenly makes the story feel like it’s flowing from my fingers. But not every short story I draft has a fairy tale ending. Some stories and I never see each other again, or after months of trying, we call it quits.

Last Saturday with my story felt like a bad date, and I reached a point where I had to bail. I left my office feeling I had wasted hours but determined to try again the next day.

On Sunday, I went back to the story. Back to tweaking the first couple pages, then getting up to do something, then back to the first couple pages, so I would know where I was at. Then up again. Then back to the first couple of pages. Who was I fooling? It was easier to spend time with my story’s charming beginning and overlook its flawed messy middle and nonexistent ending.

But I kept at it because when I’m writing, I consider banging my head against the wall to be part of my creative process.

After bumbling along with the story for a couple of hours on Sunday — I had been wrestling with the narrator’s voice and the story’s tense — an idea occurred to me. I revised the first few paragraphs, giving the narrator a distinct voice that seemed to fit the story’s theme and fix the tense problem at the same time. We’ll see.

For now, the story and I plan to keep seeing each other. We have coffee together in the mornings, before I pick up my grandchildren from summer school. Sometimes in the afternoon if my grandchildren are playing quietly, I sneak into my office and spend extra time with the story.

The relationship is progressing in a positive direction, but I’m not ready to declare it a love match, and the story remains unnamed. It could still turn out to be yet another frog that won’t become a prince.

(By the way, there is no reason to tell my short story that I hung out with a blog today.)