All writers finish and ship. You got this. Everything is ready. Now it is time to ship. Are you certain? When did you Finnish the writing? When is that? Tricky questions for all creatives from the artistic side’s writers, artists and performers to the pragmatic side’s architects, engineers and business builders.
Being finished can be easy or hard, it depends on the variables. For our talk here I will stick to writing, but the base concepts are universal for all creative types.
Theory says that a writer is done when they can ship. Practice often stalls shipping. Shipping has several options and depends a great deal on the writer. When we ship happens a lot for writers in the process and can be when we send the work to an editor, publish the article on line or deliver that white paper to a client. Writers ship at several stages, some are harder to get past and are toally different for most writers.
For the most part to ship is the point where we can no longer make changes to our draft. We go live. For many writers this is where we get cold feet. We feel that inner critic just hammering away at us. It is not always easy to know the answer to the question in the back of 0ur head. When is this work ever really going to be done?
Do I have to finish to ship?
A lot of people make the mistake of bouncing between the belief that their stuff is crap and over editing or thinking that every line they put down on paper is golden and waste time trying to make the work work. Neither is hardly the case. They are both stalls to ship.
Every writer needs to know when to let go. Our job is to filter through our raw material to find the pure ideas we are aiming at. Sometimes that means we have to know to let go of the clinkers.
What’s a clinker?
When we used coal fired stoves people often found one or two pieces that did not burn in every load. The nonburnable pieces were called clinkers. They were often the result of either low quality fuel or not burning the fuel right. The common answer back then was mostly just to shovel them out and start over with a fresh load.
Writing works much the same way. When we form clinkers we have to know to shovel things out and start over. We have to know when to let go.
Did you go all Picasso or George Lucas or Sir Author Conan Doyle?
If it were easy to know when a creative work is done masters like Picasso, Lukas and Doyle would have had a far easier time of it. Knowing when we are done is as much a sense from our guts as it is a plan spelled out in great detail on paper.
Picasso was showing his newest collection to his friend and Paris art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler when his voice fell silent. In that moment Picasso could see his work had not really reached his vision. Picasso knew his work was not done. He seized a palette knife and shredded each one in turn.
All the time Picasso destroyed months of work his friend kept trying to stay his hand. “Arrête Pablo. Arrête.” Nothing could stop him. In that moment Picasso took himself back to square one. Sometimes you have to know the work is not ready.
Our early success can prevent finishing and shipping also
George Lucas found his work incomplete for decades. Fans raved about this along with him, but it was a case of misunderstanding of what the work scale was. Fans loved the story and demanded the remaining unfilmed six films he had used to craft his back story, story line and characters.
There is little doubt that Lucas could have finished all the films sooner if he had not piddled around fine tuning the original three through several incarnations. The question real question was should he tell the story for the audience or for himself?
Lucas’ vision only wanted to tell the story of the first three films, chapter four to chapter six. Lucas focused on perfecting the vision for the first films instead of finishing the rest of the films and shipping them to his audience. He spent years remaking the films after they had been in the theaters for various versions as the technology allowed him to expand our view of his original vision.
Lucas’s Answer
As Lucas said in an interview on his 2004 updated version of the first film from 1977,
“The special edition, that’s the one I wanted out there. The other movie, it’s on VHS, if anybody wants it. … I’m not going to spend the, we’re talking millions of dollars here, the money and the time to refurbish that, because to me, it doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s like this is the movie I wanted it to be, and I’m sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it. But I want it to be the way I want it to be.
I’m the one who has to take responsibility for it. I’m the one who has to have everybody throw rocks at me all the time, so at least if they’re going to throw rocks at me, they’re going to throw rocks at me for something I love rather than something I think is not very good, or at least something I think is not finished.”
Fans and Lucas aside, the industry is far better off tech wise because of all that time Lucas spent to advance the tech he needed tell his story. The main thing is that in the end it is the writer who says the works done. Though eventually Lucas did bow to the public desires. He made the first of the remaining six films and he set the stage for the reast of the films to be made from his notes and guidelines.
Doyle Changed his Mind
Sir Author Conan Doyle was not consumed by perfecting a vision of his work. He was tired of writing about Sherlock Holmes, so he killed Holmes to get free of the story. The ire of the public over the untimely end of the story, including bricks through his publisher’s window, forced Doyle to bring Holmes back. It was much later that he could quietly quit the tale.
For Doyle the return of Sherlock Holmes ensured immortality for the Holms story, but very few of us today know of his Lost World that has been used for many Jurassic type worlds since including works like Jurassic Park.
So who knows when best to end the story the author or the audience?
Many would like to see ourselves as Picasso with the steel nerves to raze our work to the ground. I am certain some do have Picasso’s direction, but most of us either fritter our time with clinkers or just yield to demands of the audience to decide when we are done. In the end it is the writer who must decide to let go or press on. We have to listen to Picasso and Lucas. Writers are done when we say. We say when to finish and ship.
Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash
