The Importance of Completion

With nothing like a silly job to distract me, my writing is becoming increasingly more important. And it progresses. I've targeted a minimum of two-hundred-fifty pages before I declare my collection of short stories complete. Last week I broke the one-hundred page mark of completed work, and I probably have another fifty pages of incomplete work, maybe more. With an uncompleted story it's always difficult for me to tell how long it's going to be. The current piece isn't half finished and I'm approaching twenty pages, which is a mammoth short story for me. But I'm not convinced of it's quality. It has several possible endings, but each one feels derivative of some favorite story or other. I'm setting it aside to polish up the others.

But writing and the subject of writing has become of much interest lately. PBS has been running a series entitled The Complete Jane Austen. They are British dramatizations of all of the Austen novels. Jane Austen's charm seems to completely elude me, but I do find the structure of her stories interesting and I'm completely impressed by her willingness to recycle characters and plot points. I think the fact that I'm not enchanted by Austen makes her easier for me to study. I'd love to study Faulkner or Williams, but I'm in such complete awe of their use of language I can't overcome the dazzle.

I have vowed to finish this collection of stories before I start a new project, but I have to hurry because a new one is forming. I started to put it into a short story, but it's a play and there's just no way around it. I'll scribble notes, but I will not start writing it until I have this collection completed and a submission strategy to get it published mapped out.

Completion is important to me, more so than publication or income.