You may be overlooking the final step to completing your project
With my blog, Finish It, I think a lot about all the different ways that a project can be defined as “done.” Some projects contain an obvious, built-in completion factor. Simple example: if your project is to empty a room, you know when you’re done just by looking.
With other types of work, the endpoint is only clear to the maker: an author knows their essay is done intuitively when no further revision seems possible — or additive. A sculpture is complete when the artist has a gut feeling that any further changes will detract from the piece.
Some projects end because the calendar says so: a deadline is met — or passed, and there simply is no more time to add, tweak, or otherwise keep fiddling.
And of course, some projects end when we walk away from them, regardless of whether they’re cooked or still raw. The intentional quit.
To all these scenarios (even the quit, though that’s more complicated), I want to emphasize that other layer to what “finished” means for our projects: the people who receive it — our existing, imagined, or hoped-for audience. That moment when the work encounters other people is arguably the definitive moment of completion.
Margaret Renkl writes, “Whether it’s a painting or a film or a play or a dance or a poem or a novel or a sculpture or a symphony or any other artifact of creativity made by a restless, curious, questing human mind, a great work of art finds its completion in the restless, curious, questing mind of the person who encounters it. And there is no predicting how that act of transformation, that experience of utter intimacy, might unfold.”
Delivering our work to other people is the ultimate risk/reward scenario, really. Even when we have a good sense of how it may go, there are always surprises — which is what makes this aspect of finishing both wonderful and possibly terrifying. But you don’t want to miss it — or skip it.
Wherever you are at in your process, have you thought about how you will launch your project into the world as part of finishing it?
For some of you whose work is easily labeled “art” or who have social sharing venues or platforms already set up, this step will be seamless, or at least straightforward. But for others of you, it may not have occurred to you that finishing also includes creating some a means of reception, or that delivering your work to other people may be the necessary last step in feeling like you’ve truly finished.
Where does audience come into play for your project?