Finishing What You’ve Started
I read an article once about teaching children how to play golf. One section of the article in particular (forgive me, I don’t recall where exactly I read this) stressed the importance of finishing every single putt.
Too many instructors drop a handful of golf balls in front of the student and tell him or her to start aiming for a particular hole on the practice green. So the student fires off five to ten putts, and if they’re lucky, maybe one or two of them go in the hole. The author stated that this is a horrible way to teach, because it teaches the student that a missed putt has no consequences. If you didn’t like a particular putt, it’s okay, because you’ve got five more golf balls sitting by your foot, waiting to be putted. If a student is trained in this manner, then he’s going to be very disappointed when he reaches his first green in a real game and misses his first putt. His first instinct is going to be to drop another ball and try again, because he hasn’t learned to finish what he started.
You don’t have to be too astute to see where I’m going with this. In a writer’s life, we need to approach our ‘training’ in the same manner. And keep in mind that I have a very broad sense of the word training in mind here. I’m not talking about journal entries and practice exercises; I’m talking about everything you write. Even when we’re working on something that we hope to publish someday, we are still training. We learn something about writing from every story, article, essay, or book we write.
With this definition of training in mind, we need to apply the putting principle to our writing. Have you started something you no longer like or no longer have a taste for? Have you gotten halfway into a novel just to discover that you no longer like the story or the characters? It doesn’t matter. Finish the hole! Destructive habits are infinitely easier to start than constructive habits, so we should all be vigilant about keep destructive habits at bay.
But what if the story really isn’t any good? Are you wasting your time? Absolutely not! And there are numerous reasons for this:
- By finishing what you start, you’re building constructive habits. Constructive habits are invaluable to a writer. Building constructive habits will be infinitely more valuable to you than any time you may have lost finishing a story that wasn’t necessarily fit for publishing.
- Just the act of finishing something does wonders for a beginning writer’s motivation. This is especially true if you’ve never finished anything before. I used to have the destructive habit of starting stories without finishing them, and it wasn’t until I finally finished my first story that I truly started believing in myself as a writer. After all, the writer who never finishes anything will never publish anything . . . and that’s a fact.
- Finishing a bad rough draft is never a waste of time, because a rough draft by definition is supposed to be bad! Even Hemingway compared rough drafts to fecal matter, and if Hemingway felt that way about his first drafts, then I’d say you were probably safe feeling the same way about yours. If your first draft is rubbish, which it probably will be, you can make it better in the second draft. And by the time you’ve worked through three or four drafts, you just might have yourself a masterpiece!
The reason for this particular blog is that I’m currently in the middle of a first draft for a novel for which I’ve started to lose interest. I’ve got other ideas brewing in my head that are sure to knock my current manuscript out of the water, so it’s a constant temptation to trash what I’ve started and move on.
But I didn’t get 160 pages into a draft just to see it tossed aside. The story I’m writing right now has been bouncing around in my head for a few years, and it’s not going to let me loose until I get it all on paper.
Plus, when I think about the lesson of the student golfer, I’m reminded that it would be very destructive for me as a writer if I didn’t finish this hole, especially when I’m at a point in my writing career (if it could be called a career yet) where I haven’t finished anything longer than twenty pages. This manuscript is crucial for me. Even if it never gets published, I will learn so much more from it if I finish it and fail than I would if I just threw it away.
After all, unless your motives for writing are purely monetary in nature, it’s really impossible to “finish and fail.” The very act of finishing something is in and of itself a major victory that no number of rejection letters will ever nullify.
The student golfer learns nothing from a missed putt if he follows it up with another dropped ball. But more than that, he misses out on the satisfaction of a finished hole. Even if it takes a couple putts to get the ball where it needs to be, there is still a great sense of satisfaction when it drops in the hole.