The fifth stage of the creative process is COMPLETING. During the hard work of the previous stage, one question keeps coming up: when is my book finished?
Completion isn’t just about what happens when you finally finish writing your book. It happens continually as you work. Each sequence, each scene, each sentence. Every day of good work, every hour of work, every 5 minutes – they all contain their own completion, their own small triumphs.
Completion isn’t just about what happens when you finally finish writing your book. It happens continually as you work. Each sequence, each scene, each sentence. Every day of good work, every hour of work, every 5 minutes – they all contain their own completion, their own small triumphs.
You know how this feels. The moment you sit back
and sigh with happiness because you’ve just completed a difficult section or
scene. You found the words and set them down, and now it’s done.
But what you really need to know about your
work, whether it’s a short story, poem, novel or screenplay, is: when is it finished? When can you stop
rewriting? When can you stop polishing? When can you stop moving the
punctuation marks around? In other words:
How can you tell when it’s as good as it’s going
to get?
Judge Dread
The fear associated with this stage is Critical Mind anxiety and it comes with
real dangers. To know if your work is finished you need to look at it
critically and assess its merits and flaws. The danger is that instead of
evaluating your work in a constructive and reasonable way, you attack it. You
become the dreaded thing: a critic.
Judgement is a completely natural process. You
know what you like and what you don’t like, what works and what doesn’t. It’s
intuitive and based on a lifetime of learning (and some conditioning). While
judging in this way, you tend to stay engaged with the thing you’re evaluating
– it’s part of you, part of your life and experience.
But when you become a critic, you put a distance
between yourself and the object you’re criticising. You start to look for stuff
that doesn’t work and doesn’t fit. You go out of your way to find problems and
faults. You become wholly negative and destructive. If you find yourself doing
this in relation to your own work, it probably reflects self-hatred lurking in
your shadow.
For Your Consideration
Appraisal makes us uncomfortable. When you put
your work out into the world, you risk being exposed, so you defend yourself
against that by intellectualising. This makes you too critical and your anxiety
turns destructive. Or you might refuse to evaluate your work at all. One way or
another, Critical Mind anxiety can stop you making an honest appraisal of your
work. You may be too willing to give up, or too willing to think you’ve done a
brilliant job. So what can you do?
You need to apply ‘appropriate appraising’. There’s too much at stake to mess up at
this stage in the process – all that work, all those months or years, and what
do you have to show for it? Here are some basic criteria you can apply to help
evaluate your work:
- Does it lives up to the original idea, or not. If not, is that a problem?
- What about the market: will anyone buy it? If they won’t, is that a problem?
- Look at the technical aspects of the work: typos, spelling and grammar, as well as structure. Can you fix them?
- Look at the work as a whole: how does it feel, too long, too short?
- Also, look at more specific criteria for this particular work, such as genre.
Be Realistic
The most important thing here is to be
reasonable. The worst thing you can do now is create a set of criteria that are
impossible to fulfil. Don’t expect to create work of such shattering beauty and
glory that everyone will weep when they read it. Don’t ask yourself to be
perfect. You are most emphatically not
a genius – regardless what your ego thinks! You are not going to topple
empires, make grown men cry, or compel the rich to part with all their cash.
The odds against everyone falling in love with your writing are astronomical.
Don’t go there. Don’t even think it.
Appropriate appraising means you develop
realistic and reasonable criteria by which to evaluate your work. Anything less
than that and you’ll be doing violence to the work, and yourself, in the
process. The trick is to judge artfully rather than to judge critically.
Let Me Go
Completing also includes rewriting. As you
evaluate your work you’ll find areas that need to be improved, changed, or cut.
Of course, you can’t rewrite your draft until you’ve finished it. And you can’t
rewrite as soon as it’s finished either – you’re not ready to look at the
manuscript that way. Let it sit for a bit. Take a break. Do nothing. Write
something else.
This is the point where another fear rears its
ugly head: Attached Mind anxiety.
This fear arises because you don’t want to let go of your story. Many questions
and doubts will come up to convince you to hold on. You’re not sure the work is finished, and if it is, you’ll have
to sell it, and you know you’re not ready to face the dispassionate market. And
when (if) it sells, what will you do next? You’re not sure if you’re ready to
move on to the next project and deal with the depression and grief that can
accompany endings.
So you hold on.
You leave the story languishing in a drawer,
ignored and abandoned. Or you start to send the manuscript out anyway. Without
doing any research, you randomly send it to the wrong publishers, agents or
production companies. You fling it into the world and hope. And then you’re
surprised when it’s rejected or ignored!
To deal with this anxiety you need to apply ‘appropriate detaching’ and learn to let
go of your work without abandoning it. There’s no trick to this. The only way
is to accept you must let go. Celebrate the completion of the work – throw a
party. Wear a stupid hat, eat cake, dance and make a fool of yourself.
Then surrender.
Surrender means you still care about the work. You’re
still going to do what it takes to get it out into the world. Once you’ve
detached you’ll be able to see it more clearly too. Detachment allows you to
evaluate and rewrite your work more effectively, and then see it the way others
will, which is helpful when you come to sell it.
You’ll need to make a fresh commitment to this
finished work – knowing you’ll probably have to rewrite it again once you find
a publisher, or producer, who’s interested. Of course, in the case of
screenplays, they’re never really finished. A script is a blueprint for
something else – the finished film. How do you deal with the open-ended nature
of scriptwriting? How many drafts is enough?
Enough to sell the script, or the book.
And I guess that’s how you do it – just keep
going till you can go no further.
All this takes us into the final stage of
actually SHOWING your work, which we’ll look at in part 6.
How do you know when you’ve finished? Share your
thoughts and advice below..
Image: The End
