The Fear of Finishing
“The moment of completion is also, inevitably, a moment of loss—the loss of all the other forms the imagined piece might have taken.
― David Bayles, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking
I’ve been “almost done” with the first draft of a memoir for over a year now.
In November 2022 and January 2023, I wrote 1000+ words every day and emerged with a messy, nearly 100,000 word first draft. The original concept for the memoir was simply a significant time period: ten years of living with my chronic illness. Two months of writing daily rewarded me a large quantity of words, but didn’t quite deliver me to the end of the timeline I wanted to cover.
Since then, I’ve had Google Doc labeled “Manuscript 2.0” open on my laptop. I pop in from time to time, bounce around, edit a sentence here, a comma there, and wait to feel like getting back to it and pounding out the last maybe 10,000 words to reach the “end” of the story so that I can start all over again with a true developmental edit.
But, unsurprisingly, I find so many other things to do. There’s a Substack post to write, a weaving to weave, grants to apply for, TV shows to watch.
I managed to get 100,000 words of my manuscript so far entirely thanks to the manageable timeline and word count. 1000 words a day felt doable, and a month of that daily word count was a challenge but I knew that I was working toward a deadline, and that the pushing wouldn’t last forever. (Though I came to this number on my own, there is also a new book by
which I just started reading about the power and accessibility of writing 1000 words a day.)I knew there were certain themes I wanted to write about, specifically my relationship to my body before and after diagnosis with an autoimmune disease, how it affected my other relationships, and how it ultimately affected, or led to, my decision to follow through on a big dream I’d had since childhood: to move to the North Shore of Lake Superior. I relied heavily on my journals to fill in the details. In fact, I couldn’t have written the book without them.
I’ve been thinking about why the last 10,000 words of this book feel so impossible to write. It should be relatively easy time period to write about—discovering the craft of weaving and how it has affected my life—compared to, say, trying to make sense of the early days of my illness. I have the corresponding journals out and accessible. I have mornings free for creative work.
Probably it comes down to the fear of finishing. Finishing the book means I have to do something with it, unless I want to let it languish unedited and unread in my documents. (I don’t.) Finishing the book means I have to make sense of a messy first draft, develop the structure of the book, and make hard choices about what the book is actually about. And after that, it means seeking out a writing group or beta reader and finding the courage to share an early draft and invite feedback, which will lead to more hard work.
I’ve encountered this fear of finishing in weaving, particularly when I’m working on a collection of tapestries that I release together. Before I release them on my website, I spend months making them, sharing the process, and then marketing them before the release. Sometimes I sell some on the first night, sometimes there are crickets.
But after all the weaving, sharing, marketing, and selling, “the funk” comes along. Every time. The funk is an overall lack of energy, sense of ennui, and certainty that I will never have a good creative idea again. When your artwork is a big part of your livelihood, as mine is, even selling out a collection doesn’t mean its time to rest on your laurels and relax into the post-collection void. Taking a week or a month to allow my creative energy to rebound and the next idea to surface feels risky, but usually it’s necessary and always, with time, the funk lifts and I find myself at the loom again.
But the funk always comes with the end of a creative cycle, with weaving and I suspect, with writing a book. That expectation, along with the fear of finishing and discovering that what I’ve spent all this time on is straight up bad, are valid reasons to avoid those last 10,000 words.
Still, I am going to finish this memoir. I want to honor those days I spent typing out 1000 new words every day for a two months last year by finding a way to wrap up the story I think I’m trying to tell.
So I looked ahead at my calendar and starting on Monday, March 18, I’ll be writing 1000 words a day for two weeks until April 1. This is not a convenient time period—I’m also finishing a weaving collection for a gallery show and preparing for some travel in April. This entire winter would have had many more convenient two-week time periods, but those have passed and left me with this two weeks, at the end of winter, to write through the fear.
Do you have a creative project nearing completion? Want to join me for two weeks of intentional daily work? Reply to this email or leave a comment and let me know!
Oh, this is so good! I just posted about overcoming a creative block and one of the things that helped me was consistency in creating at least a tiny bit of art ad a specific time limit also helps a lot (hence the 100 day project). Actually, apart from art I have a lot of post drafts and ideas that are sitting sad and unattended in my Notes app. So I'd be glad to join you and push some of those drafts nearer to completion stage!
Jami Attenberg's book was so inspiring! I want to get my own copy so I can re-read it over & over again when imposter syndrome creeps in. I'd love to join you for two weeks of intentional daily work :)