When is a work finished?

You may or may not have seen, but I have had the opportunity to re-release Tawny & Cree: The Beasts of Dropull. While this is exciting it also forced me to contemplate a serious question for writers, when is a work finished? When I was at university, studying a creative writing unit, my lecturer posed this question to us. He discussed how when you publish work, you don’t want to publish something of low quality, so you spend time editing it, but also you could find yourself working on the same project for twenty years and in most cases, especially if you wish to pursue writing as a career, that is not possible. I have often grappled with this, especially when dedicating time to edit my work but I have set two key criteria for when I consider a work finished. The first is about when I want it to be published, often I will want a work to be out by a certain time and this, I find, helps me stay motivated and focussed. The other is that I have to be happy with it, that is that I look on my work and tell myself honestly, that I like it and there is nothing I want to change.

While this is true for all my writing, that doesn’t mean when I look back on some of my past pieces, I know that if was to write the same story today, I would do it differently. Partly because I know I have developed my craft as a writer, so I feel I can produce a higher quality work, but also because I have developed as a person, and sometimes things that I once thought to be great, I reflect and considered it less than. This is where Tawny & Cree: The Beasts of Dropull enters the story, when I was given the opportunity to re-publish it, I decided to go through and fix the grammatical errors that I knew existed, but as I did, I found myself reflecting on the younger writer who wrote it and started making changes. One reflection that I made was that my younger self seemed to really enjoy short impact sentences when a comma would not only suffice but actually work better. I also changed the tense of my writing, from present to past, as I felt and do still feel that past tense works better. You could argue that when I published it, that is it, it should be done and I should just accept what I wrote, but I find myself in this opportunity where I can improve on a story that I adore and potentially make it higher quality and more enjoyable for the readers.

If you have read the original version of the story, then there is only one real plot change, one that I have wanted to change since it was first published because I felt it was out of character for Cree, but you will have to read it to see the change for yourself. Otherwise, most of the changes were smaller, such removing certain dialogue from one space and adding a bit more detail in another, all related to flow issues. Still, I reflect on this, though right now I am making changes, would I or should I, make changes in the future if I was given the opportunity? Part of me would say no, just leave it as it was, like an historical artefact, but then again, I am not leaving Tawny & Cree: The Beasts of Dropull untouched, I am changing it. I certainly do not want to be in a situation where I am changing my work so often that it wears both myself and my audience out, I will need to move on to other projects, I just find that this opportunity allows me to refine something of mine, something that I valued. Maybe it is dependent on the project and how I feel towards, but I do know that I once felt very confident in answering the question, when is a work finished. I no longer feel confident in answering, perhaps because I feel now that the question should change, instead of asking when is a work finished? Perhaps I should ask, when am I done with a work, for a work can never truly be finished in the eyes of its maker, but a writer can be done with it. I wonder how I will feel in twenty or so years, looking back on this piece and asking myself am I still happy with it. Maybe I won’t be, but I am confident that by then, I will be more than done with it.

If you haven’t already, make sure you read Tawny & Cree: The Beasts of Dropull and leave a review wherever you buy it, I would love to hear what you think. You can also pre-order the next instalment, Tawny & Cree: Amazonian Trial.