the art of finishing
I've got over 60 articles in my drafts.
Some are stubs, some are almost short books. None are finished. They remain in limbo, still with the promise of perfection misting around them. The ideas are half-formed and could still be revelatory, yet to be spoiled by clumsy writing or exposed by the scrutiny of others.
Do something good once and you'll have to follow it up. Some dash something out quickly to capitalise on newfound status. Others retreat and spend years agonising over it. You suddenly feel that everything needs to be up to the quality and ambition of your first effort.
There are a few people I admire on the internet who have a capacity to ship their work. Seth Godin and Isaac Morehouse both espouse the value of a daily blogging habit and I've spoken about them before. Jack Butcher is a newer man on the scene, iterating his way to design greatness with Visualize Value.
Shipping relentlessly isn't necessarily a recipe for quality work though. I've seen a few attempts at aping the men above, particularly in the case of Butcher, and all I see is mediocre imitation, a lack of innovation and a surely joyless creation habit. I don't think more is more is necessarily the right way. It's good practice for you, but should the whole world be subjected to it if it's poor?
I suppose you only need to be right once.
To make something that's remembered is tough enough so to make 100 permanent things is extraordinary. It only took Picasso tens of thousands of tries.
kaizen
The way of continuous improvement. The Japanese word kaizen literally means ‘change for good’ with an inherent meaning of ‘continuous’ and ‘philosophy’.
In manufacturing Japanese companies use Kaizen to constantly assess areas for improvement or areas where wastage can be eliminated; they can then make these changes as quickly as possible, sometimes on the same day.
This may work in general but it's anathema to finishing, particularly with creative work. Editing writing is like cutting hair, there's always something else to prune or shape. Keep cutting and nipping away at it and you can go forever.
In the digital world, this tinkering is more possible. Kanye West famously released The Life of Pablo with an extravaganza at Madison Square Garden but continued editing and adding tracks for months afterwards, the new versions cropping up on Spotify in a manner impossible with the old cd format. You can now release books on Kindle and continue to alter them after release, the new versions syncing automatically when readers power up their device. Nothing is ever really finished. Rather than freeing though, this can leave your work in draft form permanently.
There's now a burgeoning trend of digital gardens, places where your thoughts can sit partially formed but public, ready to be improved upon by someone else or to pressure you into developing them further. Less concrete than a post, these gardens imply constant tending and permanent impermanence. A state where you know that there's more to say about something, you just need to get around to saying it.
Now, with the possibility of endless revisions, comments, shares and likes, nothing ever really ends. You need to end it yourself.
the half life of ideas
With many of my unfinished pieces, the ideas are ageing and will become irrelevant. While you may want to always write something that can stand the test of time, where you are when you start writing something could be miles away from where you finish it.
For example, I began writing a longer piece about my experience of co-living in Portugal late last year. I found a small community of people who were working remotely in a similar way to me. This remote working community is not a new thing - Nomadlist has over 2 million users in the past year - but to my peers, it seemed like an odd thing to do, work being something you commuted in to and did in a set place for the most part. Now everyone's been working from home for months, the idea of setting up camp somewhere wildly different to where you usually live doesn't seem so outlandish. My piece that would have seemed slightly prescient if I'd published it at the time, now seems slightly old hat and obvious.
“Particular bits of knowledge are nothing, because they are made up, of what President Hutchins has called rapidly aging facts. Principle and method are everything”
For knowledge you could also read deeds. What you did today will become something that happened yesterday, then something that happened once, then something everyone has forgotten. Very few deeds ring through history. Clinging to specific knowledge or past deeds means you're doomed to be surpassed.
the half life of art
Art has a similarly short life in our consciousness. Think about music. Streaming has led to the increasing power of catalogue, of old stuff. Iconic songs remain iconic while new stuff is easily surpassed and forgotten by newer stuff. I was struck by thinking about big hits from artists like Justin Bieber. Sorry and What Do You Mean were everywhere, racking up billions of streams. Do you ever hear them now?
I certainly don't.
Fleetwood Mac are a good example of an artist who have mined their catalogue to appeal to a new generation of listeners. To phrase it cynically, they have made some evergreen content. What it really is is great art that will be remembered forever.
Books and music default to the classics. The best stuff lasts longer and sells more than new stuff. A classic remains a classic. Here are the best-selling books of all time (with semi-reliable sales figures):
When you think of it like this, creating new stuff doesn't tarnish your old stuff. The first Harry Potter outsold the next most popular by almost double. I suspect JK Rowling’s later books have sold nowhere near that. That’s not a bad thing! It just means that if it really resonates, if you make something really excellent, it will be remembered for what it was, maybe even enjoying a new lease of life later on. Your new stuff is more just a chance at making something else timeless.
Sport is the ultimate corollary here. You can win the World Cup or an Olympic medal and you'll be that thing forever. The thing is though, you'll also be whoever you are that day. Perhaps next time you don't qualify. That doesn't affect what happened before. You still did that thing, climbed that mountain, wrote a little slice of history.
Martha Graham
It's our curse to be dissatisfied. When you're writing, you can edit forever. Eventually you just need to publish. When you're playing sport you can win the World Cup but you might feel that you should have won the one before. Or the one after.
what's old can be new
If creativity is combinational, if we combine the old with the new, if we sample older work, put a new twist on it, filter it through our own experience, then work you create now may become the backbone of something you make in the future.
Barbarian Days by William Finnegan was a model for my book Fringes. It's an amazing piece of work about a man's life as a surfer. Not a professional but evidently a skilled practitioner. What surprised me when researching the book after I'd finished was how much of the material appeared elsewhere, reconstituted from magazine articles or hinted at in newspaper clippings. Finnegan had evidently tested his work in the wild before refining and collating it into the finished object, a Pulitzer Prize winning memoir.
The act of publishing doesn't mean that you can't touch that work again. In fact, you almost lay claim to your words, to your ideas and give yourself the license to use them again. You can reference yourself and create a tapestry of old and new. That's essentially what happens when you create in the first place anyway.
The upshot is that I'm going to work through some of these posts, these half-formed ideas and test them out here, following their threads to a conclusion. Or not. Whatever comes of them, there's no way they won't be of use to me. I just hope they're of use to you too.