You Have to Finish

"You have to finish -- that's what you learn from, you learn by finishing things."
-Neil Gaiman

That quote is sitting on my desktop right now, staring at me.

I have two finished first drafts. One of them was in the midst of a rewrite when I was hit with a sudden and intense desire to do something else. Anything else. I couldn't concentrate on the writing.

Maybe it was creative fatigue, or maybe it was guilt for spending so much time on something I like doing. It's ridiculous, but I grew up with the concept (largely from the Florida public school system) that if it doesn't hurt, it isn't work. And if it isn't work, than it isn't worth doing.

No matter what the cause, I have yet to finish the rewrite.

I thought focusing on some short stories would help. I thought that having something short published would push away the guilt with a little dose of commercial viability. There were two main problems with this plan:

  1. Short story markets are a lot pickier than you might think.
  2. I'm just not that into short stories. Don't get me wrong, I think short stories are a great place to experiment and a great way to try and condense ideas. I think it's an important form to learn the major concepts of writing. I greatly admire those who have mastered the art of subtext to the point where they can get a novel's worth of emotion into a single 10-page story. I just don't think that current-me is one of them.

So, that puts paid to that plan. Now what? Well, I still need to finish something. That novel isn't going to rewrite itself and the idea of finishing the thing and moving on already feels like yanking a mental thorn from my left cerebral hemisphere. 

So, remember kids: if you don't finish it, it may haunt you. And if you need to hurt at work, get a part-time job making pizza or something. Just keep writing, too.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

My Mid-Book Crisis

Image
I'm hitting a wall with Weather Vane Island.  I'm on chapter 8 and, despite the grouping of many tiny adventures, a question still lingers: "When is the story going to begin?" Looking at the manuscript, I feel dejected. I can only shrug my shoulders and answer: "I don't know." This is familiar territory for me. I ran into it in the first draft of Weather Vane Island  and my answer was to just add whatever crazy thing came to mind, eventually kneading the dough of my story into something ineditable. I ran into the same wall in my first draft of Nothing Extraordinary (a work in progress) and my solution then was to charge forward, keeping faith in my outline until my writing became a bland, programmed march to the end. I've also run into the same wall with other stories that I put into drawers, unfinished, because I didn't have the wherewithall to push through. I've come to term this a "Mid-Book Crisis." For whatever reason, af...
Read more

Advice on the Internet

Image
There is so much advice on the internet. There's advice on how to eat, how to sleep, what that slight pain in your side means, when to see a doctor, and how to negotiate your medical bills. There's also plenty of advice on writing. There are YouTube channels, podcasts, blogs, forums, and ebooks. There is so much content online trying to tell you how to do things that it can be difficult to know who to listen to. To help you sift through the mess, I've decided to offer four questions to ask yourself about any writing advice (that I ask myself): Does this advice in any way serve the person giving it? There are plenty of people out there ready to make a quick buck off of the dreams of writers, so beware any kind of advice that seems to profit the adviser. For example, is one bit of advice that you should take a writing workshop--when they happen to offer a 2 week online writing workshop? Do they encourage doing daily writing exercises, and then offer you a handy ebook ...
Read more

Leaving Blogger

Image
I've officially left blogger for a new place on my own website. If you want to keep up with me, my writing, and (of course) my blog posts you can find them at CarrieCallahan.com . See you there!
Read more