Messy completion + right-sizing your writing

An experiment for the weekend.

Photo by Abhishek Koli on Unsplash

An experiment: What could you bring to messy completion now?

I used to ask this question in the Hummingbird Sessions, because I like how it’s not: what goal are you working toward this year? And also not: what should you be finishing? And definitely not: what’s worth spending your time on?

Just: what’s one thing—anything—you could bring to messy completion now?

Emphasis on messy—because the point is process, not polish.

I like experiments like this, because they’re ultimately a challenge to right-size your creative practice and your expectations.

I’m sometimes tripped up by how, when, and where to break projects down. I love a writing session where I go all in on a draft and sit in the deep-deep heart of it. I call this “sitting at the bottom of the ocean.” The pitfall is that when this becomes my standard for a meaningful writing life, I’m often dissatisfied by anything less than the whole ocean.

So I’ve had to play with right-sizing my practice, while still getting some of the heart and depth that I need from it.

For me, there are two ways to “right-size” the experiment of messy completion:

1. Choose something small enough to be manageable…

2. …and interesting enough to be meaningful.

experimenting with messy completion

Make it small enough to be manageable:

• A rough draft of an essay that's waiting for a title. (How many possible titles can you invent in three minutes?)

• A line of poetry that wants to grow into something more. (What if you took a walk and repeated the line until another one answered it?)

• A scene in a story that still lives mostly in your head. (What if you put one of your favorite songs on and wrote the length of it?)

And interesting enough to be meaningful:

• What if each title you invent has to be a little weirder or more opinionated than the last?

• What if you imagined this line of poetry as the last line in the poem?

• What if the speaker or main character in the scene admitted a secret, but only to the reader?

Messy completion is for practice. It’s for you.

It’s a reminder that what we call “finishing” a piece of writing is actually 1,000 other moments of making choices and completing parts along the way.

I like how messy completion takes the full creative process (forming an idea to realizing the idea) and miniaturizes it. This makes repetition easier, and repetition has a way of generating useful feedback.

In the same way visual artists practice mark-making, I want a way as a writer to practice making marks and notice how they land, how they feel in the piece, how they surprise me in the process. Then I can adjust and form the next experiment. It’s all good feedback—and so helpful to get along the way, in a practical experiment like this, rather than looming like an abstract “revision phase” at the very end.

More and more I’m noticing I need the little experiments and small marks along the way because of how they build up my tolerance for the creative process as a whole. Besides being energizing, they help me better withstand the inevitable uncertainties of the process.

I know this might sound ridiculous, but: your process is there to teach you how to use the process. It’s not just there to help you perfect things.

If you try some messy completion in the days ahead, I’d love to know how it goes for you. (I have an essay that’s on my radar for this experiment.)

Important to say: I’m wondering about all this from an honest place of in-the-moment learning. There’s a piece of writing of mine that I now feel was overtightened, overpolished. It was done and finished, for what it was. But now I wish for something different for it… except it’s now out in the world in that other state. I’ve never felt this way before, so it’s making me feel a little sad but also weird and curious all at once. I don’t regret it, but I’m taking note of it. I probably needed this to happen as I keep going with my new project. I’m asking myself what happened in the process, and this letter comes from that space. ✨