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This is Elizabeth Stark in the Book Writing World. Welcome to Finish Your Book Week 11.
This course is called “Finish Your Book.” Does that mean that you take it once and it’s done? Not necessarily. Depends on where you were when you started the course and how far you’ve come. It may be that you want to cycle though Revise Your Book and Finish Your Book again, deepening and strengthening your book.
But at some point, you are done. This is one of the biggest questions in the Book Writing World: how do you know when the book is done? We’ve asked it of visiting writers and of ourselves, and there’s no precise formula for determining that the book is complete.
There’s a saying: “A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned.” This has been variously attributed, probably because a lot of people have said it. You do not exactly come to the end. You pronounce it.
But when?
A teacher of mine, the writer Donna Levin, said, Rewrite your book as many times as you can stand—and then rewrite it one more time. In my experience, it often takes a few more times than you can stand.
You pronounce your book done when you’ve combed over the sentences and made them strong, tested the foundation and the structure and found them sturdy and weight-bearing, overcome your desire to be done with it and instead put in the necessary and sometimes wrenching labor to actually finish it.
You abandon it because the next step in its growth is to find and delight and move and transform readers, as we have been found and delighted and moved and transformed by our favorite books. The book is not perfect, but it is the best you can do right now without starting over again. (Save the starting over again for the next book!)
If you tend to be a perfectionist, you will have to let go of the book before it feels done. Its imperfection, partial nature and flaws will dog you, but you know that you are a perfectionist and that in fact and still, everything you love is imperfect and partial and flawed.
If you tend to be overly eager to proclaim something done—if the desire to name it as complete comes not from an assessment of the book but from exhaustion or a wish to have written rather than to be pulled back into the physical labor of revision—you will have to find ways to support yourself and keep yourself honest and go back to the book. The book. It’s all about the book.
But if you are struggling with the question of how you will know it is done, look at how far you’ve come! You had a dream, a desire to write a book, and now you have a manuscript you’ve worked and reworked, submitted to testing and examination, shown to readers, labored over with your heart and your wildest intelligence. That, in and of itself, is a marvelous achievement and a marvelous way to live.