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The feeling that your book can approach finished but never quite reach it—that the path to completion is, to put it geometrically, asymptotic—can dog a writer.
“A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned.” — variously attributed
And yet when is the right time to “abandon” your work? You must go back to your first question, the question you wanted to answer when you began this book. What have you learned?
You must go back to your vision. What was most important to you about this book, on the level of content, form, style?
Somewhere I read about someone searching for her house. She made a list of the aspects of the home that were requisite, others that were preferred, and some that might be nice. For example, she may have needed to choose a place that got good sunlight. That was non-negotiable. But if the kitchen was not remodeled, she didn’t care. She never cooked anyway. Learn what you require to consider your book finished. It must be excellent. It will take more than you think you have to give, and you will grow in order to be able to give it what it needs. But even so, at some point, it will have to be enough.
You have a budget—an amount of time and energy you can afford to spend on this book. And so you have to work within your budget—stretch it, sure, but concede to it finally. Therefore, know very clearly your own criteria, and what you are willing to sacrifice.
In addition to your own planning for the book and your own vision, you have one more great tool for figuring out what is most important to this book: the book itself. Read it, listen to it, let it teach you what it has become, which is inevitably different from what you imagined it would be.
Ultimately, you must approach the question of whether your book is finished in two concrete ways:
1) Ask yourself what your finished book looks like. What are five most important qualities that your book must have for you to consider it finished?
2) Make a finite list of actions you must take in order to complete your book. If you need a number: what dozen actions would take you from here to done?
Approach your project from these two angles—the vision of the book (what you are moving towards) and the manuscript itself (where you are starting now). The second list defines the gap between the manuscript as it exists now and the book you want to create in the end. In order to create that second list, you must be able to see your book’s strengths and weaknesses as clearly as possible. You must choose what you will fix and what you will accept.
A final note on questions
It may well be that in order to reach this final phase, you need input from outside readers, and questions come into play here, too.
Questions are what pull a reader through a book, and yet critics often point to their questions as if these mark mistakes on the part of the writer. And new writers often go back and try to fill in the answers to these questions prematurely, never realizing that the questions are what engage the reader and keep him moving through the text.
So ask your readers to give you portraits of their experiences in reading the book, including their questions. Only you can decide if you want your reader wondering that particular thing in that particular place.