On Finishing
...a truly exquisite pain...
On Finishing
If you think starting is hard just try finishing.
Some people are finishers, but I am not sure I have ever met a writer who is a natural finisher. That’s why editors are so useful- they’re the ones who enable you to finish the book by badgering, suggesting and cutting and saying, finally- enough’s enough already!
But I am not a finisher and never will be so I have had to learn some tricks and manoeuvres in order to actually get things done.
Starting is easy for me. I still start things without properly thinking it through. And when you’ve had a few successes you drop your guard and start things half cocked. Then you don’t finish them and you call them ‘failures’ but actually you just didn’t finish them.
A unfinished thing has a curious effect though, it occupies space in your psyche, it sort of both gnaws away and enlarges its presence, and yet also dwindles away to nothing. I speak from the experience of attempting to learn several modern langauges and not finishing them at a stage of assured competence. My ability has trickled away. And yet the experience of all the effort I put in remains. It’s as if I have the worst of both worlds.
When you finish something you put a line under it. You can move on. It’s secure in the vault of your experience bank but it doesn’t interfere with any new things you might want to do. Indeed, to continue this banking metaphor- it acts as security for any new project.
That’s why finishing is such a good thing for writers. If you have too much unfinished stuff clogging up your hard drive- well, you begin to slow down and lose confidence. You need that finished stuff as a kind of fuel.
For two years when I was in my late 20s I wrestled with writing a children’s book that remains, to this day, not quite finished. I kept tinkering with it on my weekends and holidays (I had a full time job at the time) and yet just as I improved one bit another would seem lacking. In the end I was liberated from this nightmare by a friend suggesting I try writing flash fiction. He told me to go into a coffee shop and not come out until I has written a story. Flash fiction is typically a 250 word story so I was able to write one easily. The next time I did two. Sometimes I managed three. The spell of not-finishing was broken.
Not finishing is exacerbated by the internet. Just now I went on to linked in to see if this chap I had vaguely insulted (he has a funny name like mine) had replied. Nothing like a social media duel to interfere with getting things finished. And sure enough, back here and typing I have lost some much needed energy to get up momentum again. And who knows, I just may not have enough in the tank to finish this thing…
Momentum is important in so many ways. If you set up enough momentum and avoid the obstacles it can help you to speed on and finish the thing you want to write.
To utilise this momentum effect you need to set things up properly in the first place, have set aside time and space for writing- something everyone will tell you and yet we often don’t do it. I’m writing this at the kitchen table not in my special writing studio…
Finishers are different from starters. This piece is not addressed to them. They don’t need to know about it. They may even be more interested in how to start things- that will be another chapter. Finishing- even the word has a dire ring about it to me redolent of going over proofs and fixing tiny mistakes and getting permissions and doing the notes- does anyone really enjoy that more than the white-hot moment of writing and the thing appearing for the first time?
Well, not many. Starters out number finishers by about 10 to 1 based on purely anecdotal evidence. In some places- 100-1 is my guess.
So how do you increase your finish rate?
At the risk of boring myself – or scaring myself- these are my 7 finishing school tips.
1. Keep intoning the advice of Idries Shah: “If you can start a book you can finish it.” In this nugget of good sense lies the notion that starting requires a bulk of sub-conscious material below the surface- just keep mining that material by probing it when you run out of forward momentum. And second- remember a book or story can be any length.
2. Remove all known obstacles to finishing the book before you start. When I wrote my first book I even missed a friend’s wedding because I knew the drinking and partying could derail my fragile forward movement. Yes- ambition made me into that kind of a bastard!
3. When doing editing- do a set number of pages a day- no more.
4. When re-writing print out the book and mark up the sections that need attention after laying out the chapters in piles. If you have some sense of the book in spatial terms it helps.
5. Use fiverr and other services to get proofing and indexing done. Outsource your willpower.
6. For tedious final admin type tasks simply try to do a little bit each day, bite off a bit each day- if you do that 5 days a week it will get finished.
7. Decide what ‘finished’ looks like when you start.
Finishing does not get much easier as you get older. Lots of older people have constructed satisfyingly FULL lives with nice activities and lovely families and other such fine stuff; this can all get in the way of finishing a book. Sad youngsters with no distractions meanwhile keep plugging away. But as an older starter in the game of writing you have one advantage for finishing- a year does not seem like a very long time. You can calmly say- well- it will take a year and that will seem reasonable and doable. That way you can dovetail your reduced chances for writing into a busy timetable but still get it done…eventually.
But young or old, the main barrier to finishing is starting other new and more interesting stuff. You have to sacrifice the attraction of new things, better things. I have a file on my computer called BESTSELLING IDEAS. Whenever I am writing and I have an idea that is WAY BETTER than the book I am writing I put it in the bestsellers file. This sates the desire to dump the mediocre crap I am writing in favour of some new holy grail of infinite possibility (how a lot of ideas look before you’re mangled and pawed them to death). And who knows- maybe I’ll do that idea someday- but much more to the point- I go back and actually finish what I’m writing.
If you start a hundred books you’ll never have one. You have to finish.
You have to keep on going even when you think what you’re writing is borderline rubbish. The author of My Struggle- the hugely successful book by Karl Ove Knaussgard- wrote of the sheer boredom he felt when writing the dull (as he felt them) sentences relating things he had done as a boy. But he kept on typing. He finished the book.
Anthony Burgess wrote how painful it is to write a book that you know is a turkey but still you have to keep on writing it. Doesn’t matter- everyone loves turkey at Christmas. I jest- but you just don’t know until it is in the hands of the reader the value of what you have written. You have to get it finished.
Oh, but there are always SO MANY great reasons for not finishing. You’re too busy covers most of the them- but digging deeper there is one kind of busy that is often fatal. When you are trying to improve more than three areas of your life at any one time. There was survey done (and quoted in Bestseller, a useful book by Celia Brayfield) that showed you can maintain up to 43 different areas in your life but only improve two or at most three at the same time. Improving takes both time and a certain kind of energy. If you are learning a new language, mastering flamenco, attending cookery school and rebuilding your Grade 2 listed house then that book will probably not get finished. You will have to switch from learning and improving these things to merely letting them tick over. Stop doing the homework, be there in body but not especially in mind. THAT you reserve for finishing your book.
The one you will write as long as you just keep typing.