A Writer’s Work Is Never Done

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

The Unfinished Work

When I was a kid, I read in school about “the incomplete monuments.”  I can no longer remember exactly their names and locations, but there were monuments that Portuguese kings started, whose building exceeded their lifetime.  Sometimes the heirs chose not to finish them, and so they were left for posterity as incomplete monuments, works of art but never finished, sad and beautiful in their incompleteness.

At some point every writer realizes their work, is, by definition, incomplete.  What’s more, it will always be.

I cannot envision the day when I will look around and say “my work here is done.”  I can’t imagine not having another idea – no, a list of other ideas – clamoring to be written.

It is in fact a lot like getting cats.  Until you get the first one, no one offers you kittens; a cat doesn’t walk through your backdoor; you don’t find starving kittens by the side of the road.  After you somehow stumble onto a cat and let him or her own you, all of a sudden people are shoving kittens at you, kittens are coming up and begging for food, and you end up with more cats and not-your-cats than you reasonably wanted.  Same thing.  Once you let that one idea out of your head and onto paper, there’s a “sucker” sign over your head, and other ideas attack at the most unexpected times.

This is good and bad.  Good because you can’t imagine ever getting bored.  Bad because many a beginner has left a trail of incomplete works and has nothing finished to show for it.

So, to be successful – or at least paid, which often comes to the same – you need to come to terms with incompleteness.  Not incompleteness as in leaving stories unfinished.  I know it’s picky on the part of readers, but they truly object to being sold a story that ends midair.  (Unless you have terminally literary readers in which case carry on.  Well done, you.)

No, first you need to finish the story or novel, in whatever form you think will be satisfactory to the reader (and somewhere along the line I’ve talked about your contract with the reader, right?  If not, I will, but not here.)  Then you need to revise it until it doesn’t read like you wrote it while smoking the contents of the spice cabinet.

And then – listen closely, this is very important – you need to realize it will never be perfect.  This is incompleteness of a kind.  You need to polish it to a point, but you cannot make it into a perfect gem of writing.  No, not even if you spend your entire life on it.  At some point you need to let go.  (I set myself an arbitrary number of three go overs, and one or two more for typos, as a limit – otherwise I’d go on forever.)

So, what do you do with that sense of incompleteness?  You take all your drive into the next novel or short – you’ve been writing down ideas in a notebook, right? – and carry it forth.  And make it better.  And then the next one better.  And then the next one…

At some point – sorry, but it’s inevitable – someone will pry your cold dead hands off the keyboard, and there will hopefully still be hundreds of story ideas in a notebook.

And your whole work will be an incomplete monument – that next thing of beauty never finished.  And that will be part of its beauty – the feeling that it could be so much better and go so much further.

Learn to live with that, as well as with the flaws.  Your body of work, as such, will never be done.  It will be imperfect and flawed.  But that’s fine, because so are your readers.  Leave them something to dream about.  Make your peace with your work never being done.  Unlike you, it is immortal, and will go on in the dreams of others after your dreaming is done.

To quote Leonard Cohen – in whom I often find inspiration (Yes, it IS an acquired taste.  Why?) – “There is a crack in everything.  It’s how the light comes in.”

7 thoughts on “A Writer’s Work Is Never Done”

  1. This is inspiring and depressing all at once.
    Are you familiar with the Spirit Line phenomenon of Navajo blankets?

    On stories that end mid-air and literary tastes. I will say this. If you are crafting a modernist masterpiece that will go nowhere, PLEASE decide in advance and PLEASE let your audience know in the first page or two. It is positively rude to start writing a traditional narrative and then lapse into pabulum half way through. It is positively CRIMINAL to do so in the last scene after having given your reader every expectation of a traditional resolution.

    See TV: LOST, or Children’s fiction: Series of Unfortunate Events, for the lastest examples of this phenomenon. None of us knew we were watching or reading Sartres when we started. It’s just a con job when you do that as a writer, no matter how clever you are.

    I have very little free time, so I don’t watch much TV. When I saw a promo for the new series “Once Upon a Time”, I was troubled, because it looked very good and I have a penchant for re-imagined fairy tales. Then it said, “From the writers of LOST” and I said to myself, “Whew, now I don’t have to bother.”

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  2. I’m more than willing to accept that I’ll never get it perfect. I’ll even adopt the philosophy of the makers of bandannas and Persian rugs that only God can create perfection, so you have to deliberately put flaws in, lest you blaspheme.

    What I can’t figure out — and nobody seems to be able to tell me — is how to figure out what “good enough” is. When do you get to the point where a reader will accept the story — and buy the next one — and it’s OK to let it go?

    That’s what I want to know.

    M

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  3. One reason you will never “get it perfect” is that “perfect” is a moving target. Styles and mores change and what was once a suitably turned phrase may well no longer be, may merely be awkward. Any review of novels over the last century will reveal their writing has become terser, the story telling less leisurely and in some cases abandoned altogether.

    Aside from that is the fact a writer evolves and grows (or at least so one hopes) and matures, so that which they deemed “perfect” when published (yeah, like that ever happens — but let’s stipulate it for the purpose of this discussion) will, ten years, twenty years on, be judged by that same author as juvenile, simplistic, awkward or even forced. Because as an artist becomes more practiced in their craft they become better and more critical judges of that craft. Or they become hacks. Whatever.

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  4. What do you mean Leonard Cohen is an acquired taste? He’s encoded in our genes–not liking him is a crime against nature.

    I’m one of those who finds incompleteness, as in a lack of perfection, painful. And it never gets better, no matter how skilled I become. All I can hope for is that RES is right, that blemishes stand out worse against a clean background, the way a tiny sin is magnified in a saint’s soul.

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    1. I KNOW it’s so. the better you get, the more you see the flaws. at some point i’ll have to talk about asymmetrical saltational development of skills too, because that tends to be one of the traps. If one of your skills lingers too far behind the others, people will say stuff like “her characters, my dear, are just not up to snuff” even though they might be way better than the rest of the field. But they’re not up to your plot or style… and so it stands out.

      But this is what explains why after embarking on a hobby or art, you suddenly hate it with a burning passion when you get JUST proficient enough to see your lack. (I’m going through this with art.) It also explains, btw, why so many people think they’re wonderful writers after their first novel, but not so much after the second.

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  5. Not only is perfect a moving target as RES points out, but it’s ultimately undefinable. I’ll go farther: THERE IS NO PERFECT. If you somehow make it perfect for one single reader, you’ll only make it less perfect for other readers.

    And too often, we mistake “different” for “better”. When I wrote my first book on software design, I got bogged down at first. For about three weeks, I sat down every day to reread what I had written so far, so I could get back into the frame of mind for the book; and every single day, I ended up rewriting chapter 1, page 1, paragraph 1, line 1. I “knew” that I had a “better” idea; but eventually I went back over them and realized that today’s wasn’t better, it was just different. I was in a different mood that day. I had been reading different influences and working on different projects that day. So I had a different way of making the exact same point, but not a BETTER way of saying it.

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