There are countless times in life when you know for sure that something is finished — when you can’t stomach another plateful from the buffet at Ming Moon because if you do, you’ll faint, puke or die — when you realise the friendship you want with someone is no longer the friendship you actually have — when there are no more jigsaw pieces left rattling around in the box — when you get to the last page of the Ikea instruction book and your BILLY bookcase is standing up all by itself.

What does “finished” mean in terms of a piece of writing? The answer to this feels complicated, elusive, but I suspect deep down it’s actually very simple and very clear.

I have just finished Draft 1 of Obsolete Constellations, the novel (my second) which I started writing on Monday 7th October 2024 as part of True Voyage Is ReturnI thought it would come in at around 90,000 words and I thought I’d get it finished in a month. To dredge up a quaint phrase from my Black Country childhood: “you know what ‘thought’ did — stood under an elephant and thought it was a wedding.” Sometimes what you expect to happen is not what actually does. Although no elephant shit has landed on my head so far during this process, not even metaphorically.

What has actually happened is that it took me until Thursday 30th January 2025 to finish the draft. This was, in fact, my fourth deadline. Having not met the original 2nd November date, I also didn’t make the 30th November date or the “just before Christmas” date, either. Fourth time lucky, though.

I got here after massively overworking and overstretching myself during October, trying to run a participatory public project, trying to support and manage a team of professional writers, trying to write a book, and trying to manage some hefty life events all at the same time. When November came around, all the things I’d pushed back or postponed to make room for the dedicated project month were jostling for my attention. And there was still a book to finish.

Something had to give, and eventually, what gave was my ability to prioritise, to multi-task, to cope, to function.

There were lots of tears, lots of moments of panic and paralysis, lots of mini-meltdowns. It sounds melodramatic as I write this, and maybe it is. Or maybe it’s not. This work matters to me and I take it seriously. When the work finally came into irresolvable conflict with the other areas of my life, the work had to be put on hold.

I got stuck into the book again in mid-December, by which time I was still only on Chapter 16 (of 23 — or of 25, if you count the Prologue and Epilogue as chapters, which I probably should, and will do from this point on.) There was still a long way to go. But now, the long way is behind me. And now I have a finished draft.

The final word count is 200,562, and I have written every single one of those words by hand. Thanks to the strips of fabric plaster dutifully applied each morning, my pen dent has grown larger in a controlled and healthy way — but my hand is still very much operational, just in case you were worried. I have produced this draft over the course of 51 days of writing, the shortest of which lasted under two hours and the longest of which lasted eleven hours. I have used 13 A4 school exercise books and I’ve drained the ink out of 16 black fineliner pens. My average word count per chapter is 8,022; my shortest chapter (the Epilogue) is just 1,797 words, whereas as my longest (Chapter 23) clocks in at 23,910. 

But none of these statistics tell the story of what it felt like to go through this experience, or what it feels like now to be at the end of it. There were no tears when I got to the final full stop. No cigarette waiting to be smoked, no champagne on ice, ready to be popped. It just doesn’t work like that, not for me, anyway. I let my special someone know I had finished, and he rang me straight back and we had a little chat. Then I had a cup of decaf tea and a spice biscuit left over from Christmas. That’s all. I hope you’re not too disappointed.

I am tired, but absolutely not tired of the novel. I will put the notebooks away for a month, then dig them back out to start the process of typing the text up so I’ve got an editable digital copy. That transcription is likely to take several weeks; I’m not a good or speedy typist. Someone asked me recently whether it would be easier to get someone to type it up for me. But doing it this way will give me lots of time to get to grips with what I’ve actually produced — to understand and enjoy the book for what it is now, and to start thinking about the book it will eventually become.

Is something ever truly “finished”? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. A piece of theatre (and I’ve made plenty of those) is never really finished because there’s always more that could be fiddled with — and, besides, every single time it’s performed, it’s different every night. I wonder if prose writers feel the same about their books or stories, that there’s always more to be fiddled with. They can fiddle with new drafts as much as they like in their own time, but once a work is in print, it’s stuck that way. (Assuming there’s no chance of an edit before a reprint.)

So maybe there’s an interesting distinction for us to make between something that’s finished for now and something that’s finished for good.

We can choose to come back to our work any time we like, and often change pretty much anything we like — writers can tinker with words, painters can overpaint, sculptors can chip away a bit more (but can never put bits back), stitches can be unpicked, notes re-orchestrated, dance steps re-choreographed.

Sometimes we need money, or other people around, to help us make those changes, but often they’re something we can take care of on our own. We can keep driving ourselves and the work towards being finished for good, but along the way, there’ll be plenty of times when it’ll be finished for now, and there’s a lot of fulfilment and contentment to be found in that.

And of course, the most important thing of all is that something gets finished in the first place. (Stephen Aryan will continue to be happy with me for re-stating this!)

Regular readers will know how often I refer to things that Austin Kleon has brought to my attention, and a recent one feels like a good footnote to this post. He flagged up a question asked and pondered by Oliver BurkemanWhat would it mean to be done for the dayIn many ways, it’s a variation on being finished for now, but it’s a variation I can wholeheartedly recommend you taking some time out to read — maybe when, or even better, before you decide you’re done for today.

As always, whatever it is you’re currently making, I wish you lots of fun while making it.