Allison Wall

A friend recently informed me that I have “finished so many things,” referring to the short stories and novels I’ve written. I argued fiercely that I have never finished anything in my life. And, in fact, I petition that we throw out the concept of “finishing” altogether.

In my day job, I work with post-graduate writers in academia. The concept of perfection plagues some of these students. They could edit their work forever. Yet, they need to turn it in, in order to pass their courses and receive their degrees. So how do they know when their work is “finished”?

I tell them: Well, that’s what deadlines are for.

This advice is less useful for those of us outside of academia’s structure. We don’t have professors giving due dates. We might have a submission deadline we’re writing toward, but that won’t be a constant.

I propose we take a more Zappa-esque stance. Art isn’t something you finish. It’s something you work on, or that you stop working on, or that you start working on again, as you see fit.

This is tricky, though, because when do we know a piece is ready to submit for publication? How do we know when to present the art we’ve made?

I don’t look at older pieces I’ve placed, because I know I’ll find thirty-odd things I wish I could change. Those pieces, to me, are definitely not “finished.” I just stopped working on them, and editors and readers thought they were good enough to share.

I think working with the goal of finishing something implies a level of finality, a type of perfection, that we just aren’t going to attain. Our work on the page is not something to be perfected. It is an artifact from a version of ourselves.

I think the goal should rather be one of alignment.

In the present moment, this version of myself is satisfied with this version of the work. They line up. It’s a feeling of synchronicity, of, yes, this is what I meant to do. It’s a sign to stop.

We don’t finish; we just stop, and the piece becomes an artifact. It’s not a definitive, sublime form of anything. It’s just something we were satisfied with at some point–satisfied enough that we decided to stop working on it.

We could work on a single piece for our whole lives. It would evolve alongside us, because as we change, the art would also change, so that our satisfaction with it is maintained. Not everybody decides to stop. There’s nothing wrong with this! It’s down to the artist’s choice. Creating is a series of choices, whether those choices result in one thing or myriad. Marcel Proust worked on a single, massive novel, and I’ve never read a more beautiful opening chapter than that of In Search of Lost Time.

It’s up to us to decide what we want to work on.

I have a lot of ideas. There’s so much I want to do, so many things I want to try, and I am changing and deepening as a person at what feels like an exponentially increasing rate. I want to get to those other ideas. I want to leave a trail of artifacts behind, as many as I can. That means I have to stop working on projects at some point. I’m not finishing; I’m getting to that moment of alignment, where I’m satisfied with what’s on the page in the present, and I’m stopping. I’m not going to be satisfied with it in a month, in a year, in ten years, whatever. But right now, I am satisfied, so I’m going to stop. That moment of alignment tells me when to set something down and reach for the next.

I’ve been working on a short story this week that I had set aside a year ago. I sent it out, and nobody wanted it. So I started working on it again. I revamped and rewrote the ending. It now feels more complete, more correct. I’m excited to start sending it out again.

So, when we set something down, it doesn’t have to be forever. Because it’s not finished, we can always pick it up again. Sometimes the work needs to be set down in order to develop further at a later time. I wouldn’t have gotten to this better ending if I thought of the piece as “finished.”

The concept of “finished” cuts both ways–it can keep us from moving on to new work, and it can keep us from picking up old work.

“Finishing” something is an artificial concept, cold and dead, without roots in the natural world. It smells like factories and oil, like cardboard boxes and garbage dumps. It denies the inherent interconnectedness of existence. It denies the spiral of creation, and substitutes that ridiculously straight line.

Nothing is a straight line. Nothing is ever finished.

Happy creating.