Tip Tuesday: Finish Him!
Or her. Or it. Or whatever pet name you call your work. Finish it. It doesn’t matter if it’s clunky. It doesn’t matter if it’s ugly. The point is to finish it.
The beautiful thing about the writing process is nothing is permanent. Writing is about rewriting. It’s a mantra you’ve heard your professors and mentors tell you many times, and they’re right.
If you keep rewriting as you’re writing your first draft, you are bogging yourself down without seeing the big picture. You need to finish it before you can see the forest through the trees. You can’t map out the character arcs if they’re never complete. You can’t see what you’re trying to say if you never finish saying it.
Do not be a writer who has twenty unfinished works. If you’re bored with it, take a break and wait for inspiration to strike up again, but don’t abandon it. This is one of the worst habits you can get yourself into, starting a new project before finishing an old one.
Instead, trudge through the muck and mud until you’ve completed it. Even if you hate it and the plot meanders, you can edit it. Remember, writing is about rewriting. Just finish it! You can perfect it draft by draft once that first one is complete.
