WHY DON’T PEOPLE FINISH, AND HOW DO THEY FIX IT?

For writers and everyone else!

5 min readJul 23, 2024

Every writer knows the feeling. OKAY, writers and other creative people have the feeling. It goes like this. “If I finish it, I should ship it. If I ship it, it will be OUT THERE! And if it’s OUT THERE, everyone will know it’s crap.”

In my soon-to-be republished little book, The Challenge and Joy of Finishing, I wrote:

“For every successful creation, hundreds are crap. But that is actually wonderful. We can only know our work is “good” if we send it out. On the other hand, it also makes absolutely no difference if nobody likes your work. Your blood, sweat, and tears spot the pages, but maybe they just do not like your face. They might not be ready for you yet. They might be looking the other way. The timing is wrong. Your luck sucks.
It doesn’t matter.
If you have finished something — anything — good or bad, you have won. You are a success. You finished what you started. Finishing is difficult.”

FEAR is the ENEMY

There it is. Right there. If you finish, you may face criticism. No. You WILL experience criticism. Nobody likes everything. They don’t like more things than they like. Especially these days! And as I said in my book, the timing may be all wrong, or you have carefully shipped your work to the wrong audience. More importantly, you may have a “face for radio,” and the people who see your face next to your work don’t like either one. SO WHAT?

BUT WHAT IF YOUR WORK ISN'T GOOD?

The easiest way to know if your work needs work is to finish it and ship it. If it is not good, you have not failed. Failure is the key to success, and finishing is the key to failure. I wish more writers could embrace this fact. Especially new writers. They used to call it “paying your dues,” but everyone from Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck to Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling faced rejection after rejection after rejection. Did the rejections mean they weren’t good writers? No. It meant they had to wait for someone to recognize their innate talent OR get better with every piece of painful, negative feedback because their talent wasn’t as innate as it was stubborn.

How do you know which it is? Are you a good writer? If you’re not, keep pushing to get better. If you are, still do the same thing: Keep pushing to improve. Always. Because you’ll always learn something, which is the coolest thing about finishing.

Stay the course. Stay in the race. All those things.

“Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished.” ~ Neil Gaiman

BUT HOW DO YOU DO IT?

Again, I dip into my book, The Challenge and Joy of Finishing. We all know procrastination is a huge deterrent to finishing. Enough said on that. Let’s look at my list of what you must master to finish (and ship) your work:

Time management
Time blocks and scheduling
Saying no
Passion
Discipline
Grit
Rewards
Consciousness
Clarity
Focus

“For many of the above ideas, there are applications to help you. Time management must have a few dozen apps, but for creatives, there is nothing like two- or three-hour time blocks to accomplish your creative output. Ten minutes here and there may work for some people (I know published authors who write on their 30-minute lunch breaks), but this is especially hard. Diving into a big project before you recommence is often a 30-minute process by itself. Do the best you can to create time blocks by using better time management.

“Saying no” may involve an app like Freedom, which shuts off the internet, email, and other distractions from your computer, mobile phone, etc. Or, you can politely say no to the coffee date or free flying lesson.

“Passion, discipline, and grit are interconnected. Having the desire means being motivated — wanting beyond all else to finish the piece or attain that goal or knowledge, milestone, etc. The only way to get there is through discipline. Practicing every day. Writing every day. Learning, painting, creating, every day — even when the output sucks, you’re tired, you’re sick, you’re making no progress, and no money — and you have no friends and no fun. The trick here is grit. Sticking with it. For more information, check out the six-minute TED talk on grit by Angela Lee Duckworth.

“Rewards are controversial. Some folks think the work is the
reward. Others say rewards help you keep going forward.
It’s very personal. Maybe one person treats themselves to new shoes as a reward. Another can get by with a Starbucks latte. Consider the idea of a reward for reaching a milestone. Get something fun for yourself.

“Consciousness and Clarity go hand in hand. To be conscious of your every action of the day, ask yourself, “Is this the best use of my time right now?” OR, “Am I on task for the work I want to finish?” The second concept, clarity, helps us be not only clear but honest about the time and energy we spend. We may be busy, but we are not accomplishing anything.

“Focus helps us avoid distractions. It’s becoming a lost art in today’s social media, 24/7 interconnectedness. The idea of freeing ourselves from internet and phone connections is useful, as in the “saying no” choices, but beyond saying no, we must say yes to staying in the flow of our work. For writers, it’s keeping our butts in the chair; for musicians, it’s staying the course with the instrument, the musical score. It is being in the moment. Meditation practice helps with this. Many creatives — and even sports people and entrepreneurs — swear by meditation. Try it.

References: Take It From These Experts I Used for This Story

Getting Things Done by David Allen
As a Man Thinketh by James Allen
The Magic of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz, Ph.D.
The Art of Possibility By Rosamund Stone and Benjamin Zander

Better Than Before by Gretchen Rubin
How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie
Tribe of Mentors (and almost any book ) by Tim Ferriss
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin