Edited March 14th 2023: The link that this used to go to no longer works, so I decided to simply post the full text here. I’ve left my old intro here in quotes for posterity.

Last month I actually wrote a blogpost—and posted it over on the Pandamoon Blog instead of here. I figure it’s aroundabouts time that I posted a link to it. 🙂

It’s called “Finishing the Unfinished,” and it’s about some of the failures and fears that might prevent someone from finishing their manuscript.

I hope you enjoy, and thanks for stopping by!

Finishing the Unfinished

Writing a book is a massive project to tackle, a veritable marathon of words. Sometimes—a lot of the time—that book will go unfinished. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. Not all manuscripts need to be finished to accomplish what they are meant to do for their writer.

For those manuscripts that need to be finished, though, I ran across an applicable quote some years ago, though I can’t for the life of me remember where or by who. If my intensely paraphrased version rings a bell, please let me know where it’s from in the comments. 🙂

The gist of the quote was this: most of the time, a project will go unfinished for one of six reasons. Three are failures in action on the part of the writer and three are fears that prevent them from moving forward.

The failures: Going too fast. Doing too much. Lacking perseverance.
The fears: Fear of finishing. Fear of bitter work. Fear of your own ferocity.

Going too fast

You wouldn’t think this might be a failure, but consider how often a writer burns themselves out after the first several thousand words by jamming all of them into the span of a day. Or perhaps you outstrip your own creative momentum, running out of things to write because you’re not giving yourself enough thinking time.

And I certainly understand! Going too fast and needing to slow down is difficult in part because enthusiasm is a bright flame that can gutter if not fed, and inspiration comes and goes. For the massive project, understand that it will take many days, certainly weeks, often months, and sometimes years. It does not need to happen all at once. You eat an airplane one bite at a time. Settle in, find new ways to feed your enthusiasm for your project over time, and forgive yourself for not being done right this moment.

Doing too much

Over-ambition can kill a project before it’s started. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the kind of undertaking a manuscript can be, especially if you’re still grappling with plot and structure and characterization and dialogue and literary conventions and genre conventions and avoiding stereotypes and researching and knowing that someday, people are going to read your baby so it has to include everything and be perfectly executed, and and and.

Breathe and narrow your focus. You are allowed to have multiple drafts, and those drafts are allowed to focus on only one aspect you’re polishing. If you’ve ever watched a digital painter’s timelapse of their art, you’ll see them rough things out, sometimes cannibalizing old work, and then they’ll gradually refine until they’re jumping between elements for the fine details. You don’t have to know everything at the start and you’re allowed to make discoveries and learn during the process.

Also release the idea that you need to devour the entire banquet. Your novel or manuscript–especially a later one in a series–does not need to tackle everything. Not all the plot hooks. Not all the passingly-mentioned characters, elements, or research topics. Your future books in your series will thank you for all the lovely plot hooks that you left laying around as you base entire adventures on a single unexplored pathway. Plus, you honestly don’t need to digress about whales (Moby Dick) or sewers (Les Mis), and you don’t need to have us follow your new side character for three chapters. I’m sure your research and your characters are lovely, but focus, please. You will never finish your book or, if you do, it’s going to be more words than a publisher will publish.

Jamming too much into the story itself will confuse it and make it stop working. At this point, even if you have a finished manuscript, it will be nonfunctional. Large, complicated stories with a lot of moving pieces are glorious, but they’re created with a mixture of precision and serendipity, and everything on the page feeds into the story. What story are you telling? Does your reader really need everything? What mysteries can you leave within your story’s pages?

Lacking perseverance

Of the three failures, this one is the most straightforward. You can’t finish if you don’t actually try to finish. This refers to all the advice of Butt-in-Chair (BIC), write every day, sacrifice to get ‘er done, etc. and so on. Make time, do the thing, yes, of course, we’ve heard this again and again.

The thing about perseverance? It isn’t flashy. It’s quiet, consistent, and it doesn’t even need to be every day. It can be cyclical or sporadic or routine. Perseverance is, at its heart, about priorities and limitations. Is finishing important to you? Then finishing will need to come higher in your priorities and you will need to work within your own limitations. Some writers have written on their phones when they don’t have access to a computer. Some writers must find a dedicated first-reader to help encourage them before they can make any headway. And some writers have children and can only write in a gasp during the wee hours of the morning.

These writers are willing to make writing important to them, and they’re willing to acknowledge their unique circumstances might mean their writing time won’t look like anyone else’s.

Fear of finishing

Whether it’s fearing what comes after the manuscript is done, or fearing that once it’s done you’ll be adrift, or that your book is too awful to finish and will never be anything better, finishing can be terrifying. The fact that this project has been important to you somehow only makes the fear of finishing worse. It’s common to stop at a point in writing (different for everyone) and wonder if you should even try.

A finished manuscript doesn’t have to be perfect, however, and the only people who expect perfect are pedants. Yes it’s worth it, especially if it’s important to you.

Fear of bitter work

Writing can be difficult. There’s too much to keep track of, and the creative process can be messy and exhausting. At a certain point, all of that New Manuscript Enthusiasm is going to drain away and you’re going to be left with only your manuscript and all the reasons you started it to try and figure out how to move forward from there. For those that hate writing but love having written, this fear can be especially brutal, and even if the joy is in the puzzle, it’s a complicated puzzle.

Some important things are hard to do. That does not make them any less worth doing.

Fear of your own ferocity

Of all the fears, this one is probably my favorite. Your ferocity is your uniqueness—your voice, your passion, your commitment. What you desire and what you need to share. Writing true things, unique thing, requires a certain amount of risk, and putting yourself out there, revealing your thoughts and experiences and emotions, even through fiction, is absolutely terrifying. Passion is often punished, especially when we’re young and fitting in with the pack is a matter of survival. Writing is an exercise in training yourself out of shame and approval-seeking to a point where you understand that standing alone on the stage of your craft is a necessary expression in order to offer the world something new.

If you think something is important, you’re the only one who matters. Be impassioned! It is okay to love your story, to need your story told. And if you need it told, someone out there needs to read it. Your ferocity is what’s going spark the connection between you and your reader, and that connection is vital.

Before I sign off, one final comment: neither these failures nor fears are referendums upon anyone’s character. The world is complex, as are individuals, and not every manuscript needs to be finished or need to be finished with the goal of publishing. Each of these fears or failures could have a hundred reasons for being, some of them excellent.

They’re simply reasons. The ‘why.’

But if you know why something is happening, you can fix it.