I was on Wikipedia recently and stumbled across a list of unrealized film projects by Orson Welles. I had heard of a couple, so I figured the list might amount to five or six movies. But I was astonished to find that the number was 33 in total, stretching back to the earliest years of his film career.
I stumbled on the list because I was trying to track down a quotation that I thought originated with Welles, but I found out is attributed to George Lucas, of all people: Films are never finished, only abandoned.
The Queer theorist, Jack Halberstam, writes a lot about his theory of “queer failure.” It is a way of moving in the world that works hard not to reproduce the structures of violence that folks live with every day. One of Halberstam’s insights is that “failure is not a secret form of success.” It’s not a gimmick to get you past the gatekeepers. For Halberstam, one must fail, and mean it.
So that got me thinking about the reverse of Halberstam’s insight. There is a way of failing in the world that is not and cannot be success; so I guess there is a way of succeeding in the world that cannot ever be a form of failure.
But if that form of success really exists, I have never found it.
I have been thinking about all this as I have tried, and tried, and tried to “finish” this book I have been working on — it seems — since the dawn of time. The book has been written, and now twice re-written, and I am finally on something like the “home stretch.”
At every juncture, though, I have been dogged by the same question: “Is it finished?”
To this point, the answer has been no. There was a better structure, a better flow of chapters, a better arrangement of words to be found. It took a long time, and I am glad I took the time. But also, it must be finished, for any number of personal and professional reasons. There has to be a finish line.
A few years back, Dan Olson (of Folding Ideas fame) talked a little about this:
One key takeaway from Olson is that you have to learn to finish — to build up in yourself the capacity for completion like you would build up a muscle.
This is my obstacle … because, you see, I’m great at finishing things. I have client work that I have to complete on deadline, or I don’t get paid. I have a radio show that has to get uploaded to the station by 5 pm each Friday … so I finish things all the time.
But not my writing.
My writing is a mess of flabby non-finishing-muscles. No tone, no discipline. I chase every idea. I buy tons of books to read. I revise and revise. It grows like a B-movie monster, my writing. A horde of snarled words.
So with the book, I have been trying something new. I decided on a chapter order, and I took all the draft writing I had been revising, and I set a word count for each chapter. Then I said I would go through and revise each one (not necessarily in order - I started with the conclusion) and would edit it down to the word count, and then that chapter would be locked.
No more changes.
So far, I am five chapters in, of the nine I’ve got to do. And it is slow going, still. But those locked chapters - I still have the itch to open them up, but I’m not going to. I’m going to get through this, and get the whole thing off to the editor, and out into the world.
And then, as fast as I can, get on to the next thing.