Known Unknowns #4: Is It Done Yet?

I’m a great starter. You want a big fucking bag of starts? I’ve got a room full of ’em! Take some home with you! Give ’em to the kids! So, starts are no problem. Two things that have been a problem for me, and which I also see constantly with students, are 1) Keeping going (which we’ve covered here); and 2) Knowing when to stop.

I’m not talking about knowing when/where to literally end a piece of work. That’s a mechanic, of sorts, of storytelling: The lovers meet, the robots win, the authorial stand-in gazes mysteriously into the horizon. Et cetera. No, what I’m talking about is knowing when you’re done.

Michael Chabon’s novel Wonder Boys and Spalding Grey’s monologue Monster in a Box are both about writers who can’t stop writing. Wonder Boys resulted from Chabon’s own struggles to shape the massive manuscript he’d originally intended as the follow-up to The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Grey’s autobiographical monologue is about the 1,900-page volume he accumulated on the way to writing a first novel. You can see where not knowing where to end will get you, right? A massively successful book or monologue, plus a movie version.

Most of us won’t get to that point. I’ve known a lot of writers who never seem to be done with anything. I’ve been a writer who never seemed to be done with anything. I know this may sound like it contradicts my advice in Known Unknowns #1 (“It takes as long as it takes”) but there’s a limit to that notion. It takes as long as it takes, yeah, but you also have to finish it at some point.

Answer these honestly:

• Have you “finished” the thing you’re working on several times now?
• Are you just dicking around with grammar and word choices?
• Are you really changing anything, or are you mildly reshaping here and there?

If the answers to these are Yes, Yes, and Shut up!, it’s possible you are having trouble being done. Why, though?

1) Fear of rewriting. This is a big one for a lot of people, and I covered it in Known Unknowns #1. People are terrified of changing their work, to the point of being irrational. A student — an adult who presumably changes and modifies things every day, from his or her own appearance to the way they interact with their offspring — will say to me, “What if I mess it up?” To which I will say, “Well, it’s not doing you any favors the way it is.” (Alternate version: “You’re not dictating the Plates of Nephi here, Joseph Smith.”) Rewriting is not just taking out some of the weaker adjectives, and it’s not going into your first-draft document and tinkering. It’s about being brutal with yourself, brutal like a German. “Vass is this piece of shit?” your inner German needs to say. “I am ashamed to be seen with it.”

Think of it this way: You’re ruthless with other people’s work, I guarantee it. You are not a person who watches a movie and has absolutely nothing to say about it. “Can’t think of a thing I’d change!” No, you criticize the books you’re reading, the shows you’re watching. And you’re doing that partly because those are finished works and you deem them, if not worthy of respect, then worthy of criticism and improvement. Is your own work not worth at least that much to you?

2) Fear of finishing. This is really about being afraid to show your work to others (as you’d surely have to do when finished), which in turn is about being afraid to be judged a failure by your peers. I don’t know what to say about this one. I’ve experienced it, but I don’t, and will never, respect it. If your fear about showing your work to others outweighs your desire to always create better work, then feel free to keep it to yourself. There’s enough competition out there for the rest of us.

3) Overshooting the actual ending. This is harder to spot than the others. In workshops, I see a lot of stories that keep going and going and going, even though the actual ending was pages earlier. This happens when someone doesn’t understand what their story is actually about, or when they don’t have a good handle on how short stories work. (I see this a lot with novels-in-progress, too, but I see fewer novels in workshops.) Funny thing I’ve noticed over the years, both as a student and as a teacher: often, the same people who hate to rewrite are the ones who will just keep writing and writing and writing. It’s the thrill of creation, vs. the dread of having to justify that creation.

How do you know when a thing is done enough? Answer: When you talk about how you just have to fix this one part and everyone around you rolls their eyes without bothering to hide it anymore, while letting out huge sighs like a bunch of thirteen-year-olds waiting on line at Starbucks. That’s how you know.

But it’s a fair and difficult question. For me, a thing is done when I’m as happy with it as I’m going to get. This is huge progress. Used to be, I would spend FOREVER on a story, doing it over and over, but not doing the real work of being brutal (German) with it. It’s a little like trying to sand down a piece of granite with a scrap of fine-grit sandpaper. At a certain point, filled with self-disgust* and fueled by a round of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy*, I began to set goals for each stage of my writing.

Here’s my routine:

• Write a draft, “draft” in this case meaning “as close as I can get right now to something roughly resembling the thing in my head.” I know at this stage it is not perfect or even good.
• Put that draft away for a while, moving on immediately to something else. Always be writing, always be moving forward.
• A month, maybe two, later, pull out that original draft and take a hard (German) look at it. At this point, I’m largely detached from the “crush” you get on new creations. If we’re going to make this work, the piece and I, we’re going to have to be honest with each other.
• Print it out and go through it as if it were someone else’s work, marking it up and making helpful comments on the page (e.g., “COME ON!!!!!!” or “UGH, FUCK YOU.”)
• Figure out how I’m going to mess it up in order to make it better. This requires some shower-thinking or car-thinking, my two best places. I haven’t run over anyone yet!
• Start the major rewrite, beginning with a new Word document, never the old one. At this point, I’m still usually detached enough to really work it over until I’m happy with it.
• When happy with it, send it to someone else — a trusted, honest reader — knowing full well it’s not going to come back unscathed.
• Meanwhile: Continue working on new things or editing/rewriting other older things. Don’t sit and wait for someone’s comments. It’s pathetic.
• When it comes back, put it aside again for a little while, because I don’t want any hurt feelings about being criticized entering back into the process.
• When ready, look at the other person’s comments and decide what of their ideas I’m going to incorporate and what I’m going to toss. Unless it’s something drastic, we’re now in revision mode, where it’s a lot of tinkering, versus massive rewrites.
• When I feel it’s good, I show it to my wife, who is my ideal reader and who will never bullshit me, no matter how much I beg her.
• Rewrite/revise accordingly, then get it out the door.

That’s my routine, and while it works for me, it may not work for you. The key is to have a routine with recognizable stages, steps, and end points. And here’s the final, super-duper secret about being done: There IS no “done.” It’ll never be perfect. I have a book of my fiction that several people at a publisher were happy to put out, and there’s not a story in there that I don’t think could be better. But that book is me circa 2009. It’s like a tattoo: are the tattoos I have the ones I would pick in December 2011? Probably not. But they’re a record of where I was when I got them, and that has value to me.

Put another way: Don’t put out shit into the world, but also recognize that this is Your Best Right Now. And know that next time you’ll have a new best and a new right now. That’s a great reason to keep being a writer, by the way: The next thing will have to be better, won’t it?

Know what I like about this blog? There are different kinds of people — creative types — reading and responding to it. I’ve heard from novelists, comedians, journalists, musicians, TV and film writers. To that end, I’ve solicited some of them to submit their responses to the question How Do You Know When It’s Done? I’ve received some back already, and will post as many as I can next week.

Thanks for reading! And don’t forget: If you never stop working on a thing, you will turn into this sad fella:

34 YEARS after Star Wars, he is still messing with it. And no one in the world but him thinks he's made it better than it was the first time.

* A big part of that disgust: our old pal, envy. All envy, of course, is bad for you and counterproductive, but there’s nothing more pathetic than the person who can’t finish things yet says, with no irony, “How come THAT writer gets all the attention?!” Well, genius, THAT writer finished a thing and then took on the whole other job of getting other people to know about it.