Unfinished business

A while ago, contemplating a sequel to my very first book, Waving, Not Drowning, I started fiddling around with an idea. It was, like Waving, Not Drowning, fundamentally unserious, and while I had great fun with it for a while, my attention was diverted to other things, some of which have even been published.

No such fate awaits Barrington Orwell’s Guide to Unjustly Neglected Composers. I wrote a few chapters, then ran out of inspiration/impetus. This happens to all writers – perhaps more often than they let on. At the last count I have four unfinished novels on my hard drive, each of them potentially something, but each of them also fatally susceptible to the condition known as “30k disease”, the phenomenon plaguing many projects that sees them hit the wall at, more or less, 30,000 words.

“Just finish your damn stuff.” I can’t remember who dispensed that pithy and invaluable advice – basic as it might seem, it can be difficult to follow, especially when you’re paralysed by the knowledge that the ‘stuff’, in the current form, is – and I choose this word carefully, knowing exactly the nature of some of that earlier ‘stuff’ and the reasons for abandonment – execrable.

It can be good to continue to the bitter end, turning something partially execrable into something complete (but still execrable) – perhaps merely as an exercise in completion, or perhaps because out of it might come a kernel of non-execrableness that could, with a lot of work, be developed into something actually quite good. Sometimes, though, the ‘stuff’ was never meant to be finished, and rather than succumb to the sunk cost fallacy it’s best to take what you can from what you’ve done and move on to something else. The difficulty comes in telling the difference between the two things – execrable or salvageable?