Finish what you’ve started
What are the risks of sharing unfinished work?
There’s a lot of talk online about finishing your work and sending it out and how, for creatives, this is particularly important. I can see why and it makes a lot of sense but I think it’s also important to consider the opposite: that of not finishing work.
Now, I don’t think it’s good to start out with the intention of not finishing but if, for whatever reason, you don’t finish a piece (maybe your session ends or it’s time to prepare dinner) I still think it has enormous value.
If you haven’t found the time to finish something, and even if this happens repeatedly, it doesn’t mean that you’ve failed.
Here are a few reasons why not finishing is worth it:
It shows that you’re practicing. This is the most important thing you can do.
It’s better to have piles of unfinished work than no work at all.
It’s anti-perfectionist.
To home in on the last point, I’d like to share something which might sound a little strange. In the interests of being anti-perfectionist I do what I call ‘cringe practice’. This sounds odd but bear with me.
I believe that actively training the feeling of uncertainty is good for the creative life.
What do I mean by that? Well, if I get used to discomfort, I can tolerate it in class when my painting hasn’t (or can’t) take shape. I can tolerate it at the start of a client project when I don’t have the solution yet. I can tolerate it when I get a rejection for my fiction (happened again just this weekend) and I can keep going. The longer I keep at it, the better I get at my craft and the more resilient I become.
(Now, it’d be lovely to say at this point that the longer I keep at it, the nearer I get to ‘success’ but really, who knows? That uncertainty has to be acceptable to me too.)
Say you post something, and you get a few lacklustre likes and no comments… then what? Internal fireworks. Really, that’s all that happens. Stuff in your brain. Internal fireworks are entirely invisible (and frankly uninteresting) to everyone else and really, they do you no harm. It’s like being cold for a few moments. It disappears, it’s soon forgotten and then you’re fine.
So, in the spirit of the cringe, I’m sharing this very unfinished (or maybe unfinishable?) painting I did at Friday night art class. Yes, it’s smudged from carrying it on the Tube. Yes, some parts are better than others. Yes, I’ve used poor quality paper. Yes I’m in two minds about the composition and yes, it’s scruffy as all heck…
BUT this is precisely why I’ve posted it and why I’m writing this text. I find it a little embarrassing and I’m worried I’ll be judged for it.
Sitting with the ‘cringe’ is key to creative practice.
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