What does it mean to abandon unfinished writing?
When you stop working on a major project - is that wise or stupid? Or something else entirely?
You know the feeling. You’ve been working at a project of some kind - anywhere on the spectrum from a single poem, through a short story, to a novel - and then you stop, leaving it unfinished. Perhaps the decision to ‘down tools’ is a conscious one; perhaps it isn’t. Sometimes you might leave the piece untouched for a few days, and then surprise yourself a week later when you realise that’s what you’ve done and recognise you haven’t missed it. At all.
Why is that? Why do we abandon our literary offspring?
Some context. Searching for my next major project, three weeks ago I returned to 38k words of a novel I started in 2017 and hadn’t touched since 2021 (‘The French Story’). I edited a few sections to see if I could get a feel for it again; posted them on this site. And then in the last couple of days I’ve also returned to something similar: 30.5k words this time, started in 2021 and merely tinkered with last year. Both are planned right through to the end; the spade work is done.
The question I’m trying to answer is “should I finish one/both of them?”
It’s a question which inevitably begs another: why did I abandon them in the first place? And it’s not just these two semi-novels. What about those poems started and left incomplete, or that great ‘game changing’ idea for which I only managed to sketch a few hundred words?
Why do we do that to ourselves, start something then stop? Because I assume it’s not just me!
One reason might be that we’re in the middle of a project when we have another idea, one that’s even ‘better’ - verging on ‘the brilliant’! Surely under those circumstances we have no choice but to break off from what we’re working on, pick up a new baton.
Ring any bells?
On the face of it, that might be a fair excuse. But do we have a history of such abandonments? Are our literary endeavours littered with skeletons of past ideas, not a single one of them transformed into a living, breathing thing? If so - and Frankenstein metaphor aside - wouldn’t that point to an entirely different issue, a psychological one about process, drive, commitment etc.?
But what if we stop because we know that what we’ve written isn’t very ‘good’? It might be that we realise the idea/premise is poor; or recognise that the writing itself simply isn’t the best we are capable of - and that we can’t see any way to turn it around. For me, that’s wisdom talking; wisdom and self-knowledge. And an appreciation of what we can achieve; recognition that anything ‘sub-standard’ just won’t cut it any more. Under those circumstances, take a bow! Being able to stand back from one’s own work and make that kind of dispassionate assessment (right or wrong) is, in a small way, something of a triumph.
But what if the writing’s solid and the idea’s sound enough?
I confess I may have been lured away by ‘the next great idea’ once or twice - or recognised that the work wasn’t where I wanted it to be - but in the case of in my two examples currently under review I’d like to think that the writing’s okay and the propositions are valid. If that’s true - and if they weren’t interrupted by ‘something better’ - then there must have been something else that came between me and my metaphorical pen…
It could simply have been a change of circumstances, ‘Life’ getting in the way: births, deaths, marriages, moving house, illness etc. But if it was nothing practical and tangible - and nothing outside my control - what then?
For me, it all comes down to belief.
There will have come a point with both ‘the French Story’ and the second novel (I’ve known if for years now as ‘Z’) when I simply lost faith in what I was doing. It wasn’t the writing or the plot but that intangible feeling which suggested that I simply didn’t believe in those projects any more - in spite of all the effort to-date. Given I had everything mapped out, yes, I could have carried on, ground it out, but… If I didn’t believe in it, wouldn’t that lack of passion bleed through to the writing and to my readers'?
If I think about what I’ve done recently - The Red Tie, Grimsby Docks, 17 Alma Road - I have believed in all of them.
Which throws an interesting light on my current revisiting of ‘The French Story’ and ‘Z’. In neither case is the issue the writing, the structure, the plot etc. I am not trying to correct anything fundamental there; but what I am trying to do is to see if I can rekindle something lost - namely, the belief I once had in them.
As I sit here right now, reacquaintance with faith feels like a really tall order. Once the belief in a project has gone, is it lost forever? I fear so; do you concur?
And then there’s also that whispering voice: the one that tells you there’s a brilliant idea just around the corner; the one that suggests ‘better the Devil you know’… “Be patient”, it says, “don’t push it.” But I worry that sounds too much like an opportunity for me giving myself an excuse to do nothing - and I can’t help but need something ‘meaty’ to work on.
And to believe in…
I recognise all you describe about half finished work. I would suggest there are good but surreptitious reasons for ceasing to progress. You touch on one without recognising it, " all planned out". I would suggest that they are probably too planned out. You may not be giving the characters a chance to break free and you are demanding action from them that they would no longer do. Their conflict is resolved by downing tools. When you plotted they were names on coat-hangers, they have become real now and you need to look sympathetically at the likelihoods of their actions. The plot may have changed. Perhaps the action is now another character's role.
I'm afraid with me it is the fact that 80% of the poems I write are just- not very good, so better to discard. I prefer to get a new idea going and try and develop that. I'm so impressed any writers like yourself who keep on going and get better in the process.