"It ain't over 'til it's over"

- and why 'finished' should be banned from every writer's vocabulary.

‘Bubbling away’ by Roberta Mason

This year I was lucky enough to have a poem make the long-list / second stage of the Bridport Poetry Prize - which apparently is the equivalent to being in the top 9% or so of the many thousands of entrants:

"We really enjoyed reading your work. In fact we liked it so much you were selected to go forward to the competition’s second round. This means your writing is in the top 9% of poetry entrants.

"We hope achieving this impressive result in such a competitive field will spur you on. Your creativity stood out from the crowd and made all that hard work worthwhile."

Needless to say, I was delighted.

The poem I submitted had been subject to the scrutiny of one writing group some months before entry, and I was therefore fairly confident both of its quality and the fact that it was suitably coherent.

However…

Yesterday I attended a local poetry group for the first time. I have been looking for something face-to-face and, having heard a number of the group’s members read at a National Poetry Day event, thought I’d give them a try. It was a super afternoon; I really enjoyed it.

When it came to my turn, I chose to read my Bridport poem. It seemed like relatively safe material with which to introduce myself, and the piece was well-received. However - and this is a measure of the group, I hope - not only did they spot one minor typo (a rogue capital letter!) but pointed out a degree of inconsistent logic in the final line, a line of which I’d been particularly proud. I wanted to dismiss the latter objection, to bluff my way through it, but damn it they were right!

Both issues were easy enough to resolve, and I now have a new version sitting on my computer.

But the experience had me thinking about the notion of something we’ve written as being ‘finished’…

What does ‘finished’ mean anyway?

Dictionaries tell us that ‘to finish’ is to bring something ‘to an end’, to ‘complete’ it, or to enhance it with polish, a veneer, a gloss. Yet it has negative connotations too: to destroy or defeat (as in ‘finish off’), or to end a relationship (‘finish with’). We can ‘fight to the finish’ or use the word as a threat: ‘I haven’t finished with you yet’.

When it comes to writing - like a poem, for example - I think we use the term to imply that we’re done with it: we’ve worked it as much as we can; we have taken it as far as we are able; we can see no other means of improving it further. Perhaps we are bored with it, or want to move on to the next great idea. Heaven forbid we stop because we think the work is perfect!

Maybe most often we stop because we think something we’ve written is ‘good enough’. Like my Bridport poem.

Yet what my experience yesterday demonstrates (and not for the first time!) is that as authors we cannot be the most reliable arbiters as to whether something is ‘finished’. Here was a piece of work I had deemed ‘complete’, yet a fresh set of eyes and entirely different perspectives brought something new to it (as in the image at the top of this post). “Is it about X or Y?” someone asked, interpretations I hadn’t even considered! And in that exchange - my words with new readers’ individual experiences and insights - it was clearly demonstrated that the work wasn’t actually ‘finished’.

Most poets will probably agree that a poem is never complete, that it is always in a state of flux, journeying from inception to an unreachable end-point. And I think that’s largely true, partly because our work can almost always be improved, and - more importantly - because the translation of quality, meaning and interpretation exists between the words and their readers - something as writers we have no control over whatsoever.

But a final thought.

I say it is ‘largely true’ that a poem is never finished because of this experience. A few years ago I was reworking some old poems to include them in a volume of selected poems. Some of these pieces were very old and, judged by my progress and maturity as a writer, lacking in some degree. So I tried to edit them. I attempted to apply my knowledge of the craft garnered over the intervening thirty years or so to make those early poems ‘better’.

Whilst I may have made newer versions ‘tighter’, improved somehow, in virtually every case I found I had lost something along the way: namely, the essence of the poem, the emotion which caused it to be written in the first place, the moment from which it had been born. Perhaps the new versions were ‘better’, but they were also emptier, less life-rich. And I came to wonder whether there wasn’t another definition of ‘finished’ in play; not completeness in any technical sense, but in the emotional. The suggestion that as the author, a piece of creative writing is about more than the words you end up with on the page; it also includes your attachment to it. As I suggested, there is a contract between the words and those who read them (and over which we have no control) but also an emotional contract between the words and ourselves, a different kind of fulfilment. Both are sacrosanct.

And when a piece of writing really works the emotional source is transmitted to the reader.

I also wonder if often it is the latter - our at-source emotional attachment - which prevents writers from accepting criticism from the readers of our work (however constructive that criticism) because we are unwilling to compromise own sacred attachment to the piece concerned.

If so, what does that imply for the notion of ‘finished’, or of quality, or of our readers’ interpretation of our work?

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