I have a lot of creative projects that I firmly believe in not finishing. Some of them are embarrassing—things made just for me that I wouldn’t want to ever show to another person. Others are too polished, too made for another person’s gaze, and too convoluted because, as I anticipate another person’s gaze, I ended up making things too complicated and undecipherable. A normal defense mechanism.
I have horoscopes that are unfinished, scraps that I redid because I changed my mind about an interpretation of a movement at the last moment. I have a book project that I spent a year researching that I finished but never published. I have a funny little translation piece that I got halfway through. I have fanfics and stories that I built ideas around—a story about three girls who attend a school for liars and a plot about a stray cat.
When a project lays there, unfinished, it becomes a body that I am able to steal from and borrow from at will. None of these ideas ended where they left off. I take from these bodies that I built all the time for other things.
As much as I believe in not finishing things, I also believe in finishing things. I’ll never be the kind of person who sits on an idea for years and waits for it to become perfect. I’ve tried to collaborate with too many fixed signs and I’ve learned that this just isn’t the way I work. Ideas are incredibly cheap to me. They are discarded and reused, sometimes given away. Ideas are about movement and you never want to be precious with them because you want to keep moving.
But I don’t always finish the things that become polished. In fact, it’s when things are too perfect, when the ideas line up too well, when the statement seems all too finished, that tend to make me leave things be. This is because slick ideas and well rounded statements aren’t always worth saying—there’s too little air in these types of things. There’s not enough flaw for an authentic response.
I believe in not finishing projects that make you feel too smart, too cerebral, and too finished. I believe in ideas that are never finished, especially when they live in collaboration. I believe in keeping your finished ideas to yourself so that you can always refer to them when you try to do the hardest thing—saying dumb things that mean a lot.
It’s not so hard to say things that seem polished but it’s far harder to say things that are sincere. I’m often guilty of not simplifying things enough. This makes my thinking convoluted. This is where unfinished projects come in.
Not finishing things means that you allow yourself to be as convoluted and strange as you want to be, without needing to hope that it all comes together in a finished piece. Not finishing things means that you can do embarrassing things that reveal something about yourself to yourself. Not finishing things means that you do not center your work on the creation of items destined for institutional homes but that you are willing to sacrifice end goals for an endless process.
It’s not your finished things that define you but your unfinished pieces. It’s the things that you dream of making but ran out of resources for. It’s the fantasies that you never want to exorcise because you prefer them to linger. It’s the worlds that exist plotless.
Not finishing things means that you can make things that are more relevant for pillow talks than artist talks, that you allow yourself the heart space to create meaning that has yet to be recognized, that you do not hold each idea to be sacred because you experience no scarcity in creativity. Not finishing things makes you focus on the question of whether you can move others based on what you say over the anxiety of not being heard when you have yet to figure out what you want to say.
