Welcome to The Day is Young, my occasional newsletter on writing.

Here's a very common question: how do you know when your work's finished?

The smartarse answer: a work is never truly finished, we just stop working on it. Or it is finished, but by the reader not the author.

While perhaps smug, both of these replies are true in their way. Writing does always involve a tension between possibility and actuality; between what we hope for and what we achieve. We accept something less than perfection--and often this acceptance is ambivalent.

And the reader does take over our job, turning our words into worlds. Reading is creative, and much of this creation is out of our authorial hands.

But I think leaving things this way is a cop-out. So let me try to answer the question properly.

My first guide to readiness is the lack of feeling. I read over a draft, and I no longer feel the following: frustration, confusion, boredom, embarrassment, regret.

If I feel any of these things, I search for the source. Sensibility guides analysis. When did I feel it? For how long? In what part of the work?

It might the wrong word. It might be a whole chapter that's just off. If I can find the problem, I fix it. Again, "fix it" here means a combination of felt response and thoughtful intervention: changing it until the feeling goes away.

Once the feelings no longer trouble me, I have a draft.

But there's never just one draft.

With my books, there are usually four or five drafts of each chapter. Then my manuscript as a whole goes through several drafts. (I saw recently that novelist Charlotte Wood was on draft seven of her next novel.)

This is because I can't remedy everything in one pass. In fact, I can't even notice everything in one pass. There are cognitive and emotional limits. And these limits are easily primed: by mood, by reading, by criticism. Suppose I just finished Henry James's The Golden Bowl, and now I'm noticing my many curt phrases. Staccato prose that should be tenuto.

Alterations also make new troubles. I change a word here, which means a repetition there. I delete a sentence here, which means the reference over there is empty. I delete this section which changes the next section's poignant juxtaposition.

And so on.

With each pass, I become increasingly less bothered. Correspondingly, the work becomes increasingly less bad. (Sometimes it even gets better.)

But how do I know that the work's ready ready?

Eventually the text's sent to an agent, editor, publisher--what prompts this final offering?

Again, this is marked by an emotional shift. I move from not-being-pained to actually-being-pleased. Put less pretentiously, I'm ready to submit a work when I actually like it.

The prose is either transparent or enjoyably translucent. The structure hangs together neatly. The arguments are persuasive, the characters plausible.

How do I know I'm right to be pleased? I don't. Not with any kind of exacting philosophical certainty. This isn't epistemology: the study of how we know what we know. This is a practical wisdom.

Over my years of professional practice, I've become gradually better at being pleased by the right things. And by "right things" I mean either "things that will get published" or "things that I like to read"--and where these two categories converge but never fully overlap.

Put simply, I trust my enjoyment practically not theoretically. I think it's a good guide. Or good enough for this short life.

Am I right? Ask my readers. Are they right? Every tradition is an ongoing argument about that tradition. Strife reigns.

In the meantime: we keep writing.

Housekeeping:

• If you've any questions about this or anything else, do drop me a line on Instagram or Mastodon.

   

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