Finishing What You've Started

Some hard-won advice on being able to write 'The End'

My writing companion Belle, demonstrating how authors need to get out of the way of their own work…

Here’s a truth - every good writer has lost confidence in a piece of writing, run out of steam in the middle, or struggled to find suitable endings. Every. Single. One. And this applies across all forms, whether you are writing very short flash fiction stories right through to big old doorstop-sized novels.

Here’s another truth - part of wrestling with the text to get it to a ‘finished’ state is actually about wrestling with yourself – your lack of confidence, your uneven self-belief, your perfectionism, your risk aversion, your ability to put something aside for later and never look at it again, the way you compare yourself to others, your nagging self-criticism. The way you overthink it some much you can never write ’The End’, or the way you avoid thinking about it too much before writing ’The End’.

This is not really about writing craft. It’s about addressing some of the non-writing stuff, our brains and attitudes, the huge number of ways we can find to self-sabotage, which can make developing and finishing stories more difficult. It’s about that folder of unfinished work on your computer or in a drawer. It’s about that rut you can get into where you make a lot of story starts, but very few finishes, and tell yourself you’ll come back to them some day.

Not all of what follows may apply to you, but I’m pretty sure some of it will, because none of us escape the uncertainty and the struggle (because that’s part of being a writer who can improve and who cares about their work).

Below are half a dozen of the issues I have faced personally when it comes to giving a story its best chance of being finished and published, as well being ones that often recur when talking to other writers or those who take my courses.

They all have suggested tasks with them, which you might find useful for your future writing sessions. And please feel free to leave comments or suggestions of your own!