Editorial Standards
How Our Unfinished Story is written.
Our Unfinished Story is a personal Life Library written by Donald Faulknor, writing as A Work in Progress. These standards explain how chapters are shaped with honesty, care, privacy, faith, and reader safety in mind.
The goal is not to sound perfect or pretend the story is finished. The goal is to write honestly about unfinished seasons while staying responsible with sensitive topics, personal stories, and the people connected to them.
Core Promise
Honest writing with clear boundaries.
OUS is built on lived experience, reflection, faith, and personal growth. Chapters may be emotional, vulnerable, and personal, but they should remain thoughtful, grounded, and safe for readers.
This site does not exist to diagnose, shame, expose, sensationalize, or offer professional treatment. It exists to help readers feel less alone and to offer language for parts of life that are still being processed.
Our Standards
What guides the writing.
These principles shape how chapters, pages, captions, and public-facing OUS content should be written and revised.
Written from lived experience
OUS is written from personal experience, reflection, faith, fatherhood, heartbreak, healing, rebuilding, and the ongoing work of becoming. It is not written as clinical, legal, financial, or therapeutic advice.
Personal, but responsible
The writing may be honest and emotional, but it should not expose private people unnecessarily, attack others, diagnose people, or turn pain into spectacle.
Clear about its limits
Chapters may discuss trauma, grief, heartbreak, faith, parenting, and emotional struggle, but they are personal reflections. Readers facing danger, crisis, abuse, self-harm, medical concerns, legal issues, or severe distress should seek qualified support.
Helpful before promotional
The goal of each chapter is to help readers feel less alone, find language for unfinished seasons, and move toward clarity, hope, and steadier ground before asking for anything in return.
Faith used gently
Faith is part of the story, but it should not be used to shame readers, force conclusions, dismiss pain, or make every chapter feel like a sermon.
Revised as the Life Library grows
Older chapters may be reviewed and updated for clarity, structure, reader usefulness, internal links, accessibility, search intent, privacy, and emotional responsibility.
Sensitive Topics
How difficult subjects are handled.
Some chapters discuss trauma, heartbreak, family pain, emotional reactions, fatherhood, faith struggles, grief, healing, and rebuilding. These subjects are handled as personal reflections, not as professional guidance.
When writing about painful experiences, OUS aims to protect privacy wherever possible. The focus should stay on meaning, growth, reflection, and what can be learned — not on exposing or humiliating other people.
If a topic could affect a reader’s safety or well-being, the writing should avoid giving instructions that replace qualified help. Readers in crisis, danger, abuse, self-harm risk, or severe distress should contact emergency services, a crisis hotline, a licensed professional, or another trusted source of immediate support.
Accuracy and Updates
How the Life Library improves over time.
OUS is a living Life Library. Chapters may be updated when the writing can be made clearer, safer, more useful, more accessible, or better connected to related chapters.
Revisions may improve headings, excerpts, internal links, reader takeaways, privacy language, accessibility, search clarity, or emotional framing. Updates are part of the project because the site itself is a work in progress.
When outside sources, Scripture, or external references are used, they should support the chapter rather than distract from it. Scripture should be used thoughtfully and gently, especially in chapters about pain, waiting, grief, or healing.
Reader Safety
This site can support reflection, but it cannot replace help.
The chapters on OUS may help readers feel seen, understood, or less alone. But this site is not crisis support, therapy, medical care, legal guidance, or professional counseling.
If you are in immediate danger, considering self-harm, experiencing abuse, or facing a medical, legal, or mental health emergency, please seek qualified help right away. Your safety matters more than finishing a chapter.
Support and Transparency
Support should never be hidden or pressured.
OUS may include ways for readers to support the writing, but support should be presented after value has been given. Readers should never feel manipulated, pressured, or emotionally trapped into giving.
Support exists to help keep the writing, website, and larger mission alive. The long-term hope is for OUS to become meaningful enough to support the work and, eventually, help give back to others.
Keep Reading
Return to the Life Library.
These standards exist so the story can stay honest, useful, responsible, and human as it continues to grow.