Finish, then decide

Abandoned work cannot be improved, sold, or learned from. A finished imperfect piece teaches you more than a perfect fragment you have been 'about to return to' since last spring. Reach the last page.

The middle of a book is where abandonment dresses up as taste. You tell yourself the opening is not good enough to deserve an ending, which is a way of never having to discover what the ending knows. Endings are where the promises of page one come due. If you never get there, you never find out which promises were lies.

Finishing does not mean declaring the book ready for strangers. It means there is a draft with a last line, after which you are allowed to decide. You may cut it in half. You may put it in a drawer. You may send it out. All of those are decisions. 'I might go back' is not a decision. It is a way of keeping the failure hypothetical, which feels safer and teaches nothing.

Set the end in the calendar before the enthusiasm thins. A date, a word count, a rule that you will write the final chapter even if it is a sketch of the final chapter. Sketches can be rewritten. Intentions cannot.

The writers who improve are not the ones with the most tasteful beginnings. They are the ones who have felt a book click shut, looked at the whole thing, and seen — often with a wince — what they actually built.