Unfinished Projects

Each year, I work on several projects that I don’t “finish”. I see this as a good thing. Not every project needs to be completed. There is value in having unfinished projects. In fact, we can learn a lot from the patterns we notice associated with unfinished projects.

Here are a few examples.

1. I made progress with an attempt to turn a screenplay outline into a novel. I discovered that I’m better at writing screenplays than novels! The reason I lost steam is because I wasn’t liking the initial draft of Chapter 1.
2. I completed the first draft of a screenplay and decided not to work on the next drafts. In this case, I wanted to give Karilyn a chance to do the next draft because this is a shared project for us. There is some history related to how well we’ve been able to work together on projects. Also, I got a bit stuck trying to determine how to make it better.
3. I wrote the text for the first book in a series of children books. In this case, I did not want to spend the money to hire an illustrator immediately. I know that I want the same illustrator for all of the books in the series, which means that I probably need to write the text for the other books in the series first.
4. I started composing a song that I never finished. This happens sometimes. In fact, I still have dreams of completing a musical that I stopped working on years ago.

One thing we learn from partially completed projects is what we care about. I like storytelling, and screenplays are my preferred medium. We learn what we want to be “known for”. Do I really want to be known as a children’s author if that project happens to take off?

We learn where we have “room for improvement”. I know that I’m good at some aspects of editing, particularly for non-fiction writing. I’m not as good at improving fiction writing, but I want to get better!

I’m sure I could find other interesting patterns by doing a deeper dive into my habit of leaving some projects unfinished!