Finishing it off Before it Finishes Me Off

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “who is to be master — that’s all.”
— Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

I don’t know about you, but there are two basic problems that keep me from being the stupefyingly productive person I really ought to be. I mean, problems apart from my all-consuming desire to recline on the chaise longue in the grass eating bon-bons and reading “The Comedians” from morning to night.

Anyway, as they say, “100% is easy, 99% is a bitch.” It’s this practice of not quite finishing things. Things like books. Articles. Ideas. Grand schemes. Taking everything out of the kitchen cabinets and rearranging the bottles of balsamic vinegar. Conquering Portugal. Things like that. The practice of getting everything in place and then screeching to a halt just before hammering in the last nail.

And why do I screech to a halt? It’s the little voice that says, “Is this really the best use of your time?” And almost always the answer is No. I don’t know if anybody always chooses wise projects — maybe Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but after that last book, maybe not even him. It would be pleasant to be more sagacious than Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but I’m not holding out any hope.

I’m always embarking on projects that are not the best use of my time because I’m not so big in the self-discipline department. One day I think I really ought to concentrate on silent film, and I get a nice film article going. The next month I’m teaching a course on medieval food and I realize no one’s written an analysis of food in fifteenth-century comic literature, and I start assembling a file. (The funniest food was cheese, because it was so smelly. Remember that expression “cut the cheese”? Har de har!) And then someone offers me a gig writing about “Dracula,” and I start a merry period of watching Dracula films. And then I make a really nice discovery about how the Anglo-Saxons liked anything better if there was a lot of violence in it, and... I kinda wish I were making this up.

So all of these qualify as big mistakes, depending on what my Real Field is, which also changes by the month, as you can tell. And when I realize this, I often drop or stall the project in ambivalence, usually after having done a ton of work on it.

So my vow of the moment is that I’m going to start finishing everything, even if it’s officially a terrible waste of time, because the practice of finishing things is a virtue in itself. I mean, not utter wastes of time, like polishing all the spice bottles with Endust. But things that are interesting but don’t add up to any cosmic whole.

I have a feeling this applies to things besides writing. A friend has dozens of needlework projects begun and never finished. Another friend has rolls and rolls of film she’s never developed. My mother used to begin knitting projects and lose interest, so there’d be a sleeve lying around here, a collar there. I mean, it’s fine if you don’t mind leaving them half done. But if you’re okay with it, why are you keeping the things around? Why not let go of the half-needlepointed cushion cover, the rolls of film, the sleeve, the unread opus by Thackeray, the unfinished PhD thesis? I think it’s fish or cut bait. If you can’t let it go, you gotta finish it. Because otherwise your whole house and brain start to glare at you reproachfully wherever you turn.

I notice as I toil away on the latest fun Inadvisable Project, my brain is screaming at me, “You could be doing so many more useful things! You could be winning the Nobel Prize! You could be explaining to the world why exactly they should follow your instructions and achieve peace in our time! You could be making things with balsamic vinegar!” I think only finishing things is going to shut this guy up. He’s a front man for the devil, whose greatest satisfaction is tormenting people with unfinished projects. He especially doesn’t want me to let out the secret about the cheese.