Writers: Finish your work!

Enjoyed a column in the latest issue of The Writer, in which television screenwriter and playwright Norman Barasch offered authors some valuable advice:

“The most important thing about writing is to make sure – once you’ve started a project – don’t stop in the middle if you can help it. Just get to the end, because until you get to the end of what you’ve written, [you] never see what mistakes you’ve made. Once you get to the end, you realize how you’d like to re-write it.”

This is very useful advice for writers. I think we’ve all been guilty of abandoning projects mid-way through.

Perhaps there are valid reasons for walking away from projects that are clearly never going to work. But when a subject does interest you, I agree with Barasch. You yourself often don’t know how the story will unfold on the page, and it is important to allow yourself to reach the end of your tale. Only then can you fairly evaluate it and set to working perfecting it through (often numerous) edits.

You do owe it to yourself. Get it all down, then go back and perfect your work. Happy writing – from beginning to end – to all.