Finishing is a life skill. It is something that benefits us our entire lives.
What does finished mean when we are a writer? Generally one of two things: (1) we have finished writing the piece, or (2) we have published the book and people can buy it. Or submitted it. Or whatever we do to get our writing into people’s hands. It can also mean finishing one of the myriad of steps needed to bring our book to market, but I’m focusing on the first two definitions.
Finishing is obviously important. Unless you are writing only for the joy of writing and don’t wish to have your writing out in the world (and there is nothing wrong with that!), you will need to finish.
Finishing matters because our work is worthy of being out in the world. Finishing matters because others won’t see our work if we don’t finish. Finishing matters because then we can work on the next thing.
But each of those things can be the reason we don’t finish.
If our work is out in the world, it might not sell. If others see our work, they may not like it. If we go to work on the next thing, maybe it won’t be as good.
These are the reasons we don’t finish.
These are the reasons we should finish.
If our work is out in the world, it may sell. If others see our work, they may like it. If we work on the next thing, we may have more skill and create something better.
We dream about those things. But we are afraid of the other things. And fear drives many of us more than hope. Just look at the steaming hot mess of all the social media platforms and the evening news for evidence of that.
Finishing requires that we overcome our fear and that is the hardest part.
Finishing requires that we make a decision on what is good enough. Perfection is not possible.
But most of us have lots of practice finishing. We finish tasks in our job every day. We finish tasks in our everyday life. Stay-at-home moms and dads are some of the very best at finishing. The kids have to get to school, the report has to be finished, the code has to be released, the counseling session ends.
Each of those require us to make a good enough decision. We have to balance more work to make it better with the need to finish the task. Since nothing can be perfect, we know that whatever it is could be better. The kids could be better prepared or the report could be better or the counseling session could go longer. But we choose to finish for other reasons.
Writing is the same. We make decisions on what is good enough based on the writing and other reasons. The other reasons we talked about: getting it out into the world, getting others to see it, moving on to the next thing.
Our books won’t be perfect. That novel has some hand-waving parts in it and this side character needs to be a little more snarky. That short story could use one more read-thru.
But at some point, we have to let it go.
The Rule of Typos says that the more people that have checked it, the sooner someone new will find a typo. Every book has typos.
The Rules of Readers is that someone, somewhere will not like what you write. It is impossible for anyone to write something that is totally, universally loved. Someone is not going to like it no matter how much energy we put into it. We can only make sure that we like it. By the way, the Rule of Readers also says that there will be someone, somewhere that will love what you write. The best we can hope for is that they find out book.
At some point, it is not worth any more of our time to perfect our book and we need to finish it.
This post is intended to help me finish a particularly challenging short story. Now stop wasting time on the website, John, and get back to the story.