Image by Hannibal Height from Pixabay
Years ago I wrote a blog post called “Just Finish It” (which you can read here). It was all about the idea that all those partially written stories and outlines and scripts sitting on my hard drive wasn’t doing me or anyone else any good. Saying that I’m in the process of writing something sounds good, but when you never actually get the damn story to the finish line, there is very little difference between all that and having written zero words. In the end, the mantra of “Just Finish It” was and is a good one. At some point we all need to have pencils down. Because you can write and revise and edit and rewrite and trash and and and… but until you are DONE, you don’t have anything.
I still believe all of it (even if the title of this post seems to indicate otherwise). However, having finished a few projects all these years later (never as many as I would like, though), I have come upon a corallary to this rule.
Sometimes when you are working on the beginning of a story you might have a general idea of what it is about, who the characters are, and where the ultimate destination might be. Then through the writing of the project, you discover other little bits and pieces about what could be added or tweaked to make the story all the stronger. It’s one of my favorite things when I’m writing.
Recently, I’ve had a slightly different experience with one of the shorts I’ve had on my hard drive for a while now. It’s a story that I have a general idea about the beginning and end, but for some reason it always gets a backseat to whatever else I’m working on. So when inspriation does strike, I write up those notes or work on it for a night or two and then it might be a month before I get back to it. This has gone on for a couple of years at this point.
But here’s the thing… had I taken my own advice, I would have created a perfectly good and fine short story. Something I might have been able to submit to a couple of places, and maybe it would eventually find its way into an anthology of my own short stories. All great things… for sure.
However, I would have not been able to let this thing breathe. Let those ideas percolate until they have stretched and become something much larger. Where the original short might have topped out around 20 or 30 pages, this thing wants to be something even more. I’m sitting around 40-50 pages at this point and have so much more which needs to be said.
So maybe the proper advice is to finish it, yes, but only if the story is ready to be finished. Don’t put THE END on the last page unless you are sure there is nothing more to write for those charcters. If you thought it was going to be a short story and it shifts to be able to become a novella… that’s OK. Let it be what it needs to be. When you are able to do that, you’ll not only have better stories, but you’ll have a better insight on what makes a complete tale.
Then you can write THE END and be satisfied.
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John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.
He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!
Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.
His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.
He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com
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