In Defense of Not Finishing Things

(Or, how I reconcile a bad habit)

I have a bad habit.

I will start writing a novel, get halfway through, and stop.

Not sure exactly why this happens. But sitting on my hard drive I’ve got seventeen chapters of a story about a group of long-disconnected friends who meet up by chance after the funeral of a former teacher to discover that each has felt that they’ve been pursued for several months by the same demonic force. I’ve got a nearly complete draft of a book about junkies who get off on other people’s memories. I’ve got a sci-fi about a time-traveller who accidentally switches places with another time-traveller. I’ve got two completely different takes — hundreds of pages each — on a story about a serial killer on the loose in a futuristic Los Angeles where everyone is a vampire and the hottest commodity is synthetic blood.

My problem isn’t ideas and it isn’t putting in the time. It’s finishing one thing before another thing takes over my brain.

To some degree, it’s harder to get sidetracked like this when producing music. Though it happens there as well. I keep an archive of recordings and it is just littered with ideas, half-baked songs, full albums that I decided to shelve… a good 30 years of work at this point. So, I guess I prove myself wrong: it’s just as easy to get sidetracked like this when producing music.

I used to think there was something wrong with me. I used to think I was dumb because I’d put all of this work into something just to see it land silently on a shelf or get lost in the digital muck on an old external drive.

But I don’t think that way any more.

Now, I think that all of those half-written books and unmixed songs are just part of my process. Not finishing those things is part of the process in finishing the things that I do get done.

I imagine that if my desk and drives weren’t littered with half-finished ideas and concepts, then the things that I have completed wouldn’t be as strong. Maybe all I’ve done is convince myself in an effort to turn my attention away from the fact that I’ve got all of these hours invested in things that never came to fruition. But even if I’m deluding myself, I still think that the work that I have produced and published would not be as convincing as it is and wouldn’t be able to stand on its own two feet in this world if it were not for all of the discarded hours, word-counts, characters, and narratives that came before.

I usually work at night, and especially late at night I occasionally think about all of those discarded characters. Characters no one else will ever know.

I’ve spent enough time with them that I know them.

And yet, in a sense, they do not exist. At least not in this world. All of those discarded characters exist in a sort of limbo. And I’m convinced that they haunt me at night, wandering in as I’m working on a new piece, whispering in the ears of the characters that I’m writing that they better enjoy it while it lasts.

In defense of not finishing things, I say that the unfinished is more than time wasted and efforts frustrated. Every time you fail to finish a story, every time you walk away from a half-written song, every time you leave a poem red-penned in the leaves of a folder you’ll never open again, you create a ghost. Sometimes you create a whole world of ghosts. And cumulatively, these ghosts haunt you, whisper to you and to your creations, and eventually help shepherd that story, that song, that poem that makes it through the gauntlet, out of the Byzantine alleyways of editing and self-doubt, and into the reading and listening experiences of others — others who know nothing of those ghosts.