So you started a thing. It’s a poem, or a painting, or a LEGO build. It’s a composition, or a novel, or a sculpture. You’re doing great! Your next big task? Finish the thing.
Somebody clever once said “genius lies in finishing things” [1]. It’s a wonderful thought, but utterly infuriating whenever I inevitably hit the wall during a project… In those long weeks when the doubt creeps in and I’m standing on the edge of a gulf between what I am imagining in my head and what I’m actually producing… When I feel like I don’t have the skills / knowledge / time / resources / talent (delete as appropriate) to pull it off.
At times like that, the last thing I want to do is finish the damn thing, whether it’ll make me a genius or not. I’d rather quit and turn my attention to the next shiny new idea.
I’m currently in the middle of editing the True Voyage Is Return Podcast. In Episode 4, fantasy writer Stephen Aryan had this to say:
“Finish the project that you’re working on. It is important. In the doing, in the creation process, in the physical act of writing, you will learn something about yourself, about the way you tell stories, about the way you describe the world, characters, dialogue…
Some people can write books very fast, but they’re kind of the rarities. For most of us, it takes months. It can take up to a couple of years. That’s a long slog… but you must finish it, because once you finish the piece of work, then you can start to fix it, then you can start to edit it, improve it and get it closer to the shape of the story that you had in your mind. You can’t do that with just two chapters because it doesn’t work. It’s not there. You haven’t finished it.”
Stephen also shared some advice for those times when the work is difficult and other ideas are calling for our attention:
“There’s the problem with the grass is greener thing… When you’re in the trenches of a novel that’s a long haul, a new idea will pop up that seems shiny and brilliant and exciting and way better than the one you’re doing, because it’s all in the creation phase.
At that point, you’re not doing the long slog of actually building it beyond the core idea. A lot of writers will start a novel, they’ll get halfway through, the shiny idea comes up and they go, oh, that would be much better! They drop the first novel, pick up the next one and they start working on that. It’s an endless cycle.
What I tend to do, and what I tell other writers to do, is when that other voice is bugging you with a great new idea, write it all down, absolutely everything. Exorcise it from your brain. If something new comes up, write that down as well and just stash it in a Word document and build a whole library of them.
Once you come out the trenches of finishing the first novel and you’re ready to start something completely new, that’s when you go back to the library of ideas and start flicking through it. With time, some of the ideas won’t be that interesting to you anymore. Some ideas kind of ferment and end up as vinegar and some, after a while, it’s a nice Malbec”.
