Fiction Writer’s Toolshed | Practical Tools for Authors
If the only thing you’re working on is a novel, a trilogy or an entire invented world, you can go a long time without finishing anything.
I love ambition. I want you to write those things. But I think you may be missing some of the fuel that helps you keep going: finished work.
A small finished piece can give you closure, momentum and a finish line you can actually see. Those are the three nutrients I want to talk about here, and why I think it’s worth making room for them alongside your larger projects.
This is my current best approach: what I think works right now, given what I know right now. At the end, you’ll have something small to try -- 200 words about a ghost ship.
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Fiction Writer’s Toolshed
3 Nutrients of Finished Fiction | ep 007
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What I mean by finished work
I’m not talking about finishing an outline. I’m not talking about finishing a first draft.
I mean a complete piece of writing. Something you could hand to another person and say, “This is done. I want you to read it.” You don’t have to publish it or actually hand it over. The point is to have a piece you can call finished.
For a lot of beginning and intermediate writers, that unit of measurement has become enormous. When I ask what someone’s working on, I rarely hear, “Some flash fiction.” More often, it’s a novel. Increasingly, it’s the first book of a trilogy.
Again, I love that ambition. The difficulty comes when that’s the only thing you’re making. Months pass. Sometimes years. And you don’t get to experience the things that finishing can give you.
1. Closure: something is finally done
You may have heard of the Zeigarnik effect. I bring it up in the episode when I’m talking about unfinished tasks that seem to stay active in your mind, like a program running in the background.
A familiar writing trick is to leave a sentence unfinished so you have somewhere to start tomorrow. That isn’t the tool I’m offering here. I’m thinking about the much larger open projects: the novel, the trilogy, the whole world you’re building.
Those can feel huge and unresolved. There’s always more to do, and it can be hard to put down the feeling that you haven’t done it yet.
Now imagine that alongside the novel, you finish a creature description. A completely separate flash piece. A 200-word scene.
That piece has an end. You’ve closed one loop. You may feel some tension ease because something you intended to make now exists, complete.
That’s the closure I want you to have more often. The novel can still be open, but it doesn’t have to be the only kind of experience your writing life gives you.
2. Momentum: a finished piece makes you want to make another
In the episode, I call this “beautiful, sweet, momentum dopamine.” What I want you to notice is how rewarding progress can feel.
You were in one place. Now you’re in another. You have something finished in front of you.
A finished 50-word piece can give you that feeling even while a much larger novel remains unfinished. The size of the achievement isn’t the only thing that matters. Sometimes a small completion gives you the push you’ve been missing.
I’ve been doing this with little scenes that pop into my head during the week. Two hundred words. Three hundred. Four hundred. I take the time to write them, and a little stack starts building up.
The momentum that gives me is difficult to describe. It makes me want to write the next one so badly. And those bursts of momentum carry me into joyfully brainstorming larger pieces.
Unfinished work can create pressure, and pressure can help keep you working on it. But if pressure is all you experience, writing can start to feel heavy. A small finished piece can feel more like propulsion.
3. Seeing the finish line: you can imagine reaching the end
“Write a novel” sounds like one task. So does “design a magic system.”
But each phrase contains dozens of decisions, structures and layers. Trying to think about all of them together can become overwhelming.
Now try this: describe one creature from a forest in 200 words.
You can probably get a rough sense of what that means. Or imagine finishing a scene in 300 words. It’s a smaller piece with an end you can picture.
That can change how the work feels before you even begin. You can imagine yourself doing it, reaching the end, and having the piece in front of you.
I connect this to the goal-gradient effect in the episode: the idea that getting closer to a goal can make you more eager to reach it. Think of a runner speeding up near the finish line, or a restaurant loyalty card with only two visits left before the reward. Suddenly, eating there twice this week looks pretty appealing.
A writing exercise isn’t a loyalty card, of course. But the comparison helps explain what I’m after: a finish line close enough that you can see yourself getting there.
Keep the novel. Give yourself some pit stops.
I’m not telling you to abandon your novel. Absolutely write the novel.
But if it’s a cross-country trip, I think beginning and intermediate writers can run into trouble trying to drive straight through without stopping.
Small finished pieces are the pit stops. You refuel. You get some closure. You get some momentum. You can see the next leg of the journey instead of having to hold the whole country in your head at once.
Some of those pieces can come from the novel’s world. Others can be completely separate. They don’t all have to become chapters or serve the bigger project.
As you build the experience of finishing, you may find ways to bring that experience into the novel too.
When imagining starts to replace writing
Here’s what happens to me when I go too long without finishing things.
I have this huge, unfinished thing in my head. I don’t get closure. I don’t get momentum. I can’t see the finish line. So I drift out of doing the writing and into imagining it.
I dream up scenes that never get written. Eventually, I forget them. I get into worldbuilding spirals, endlessly recreating things and rethinking things.
Pointing thoughts at the big project makes it feel smaller for a little while. But it becomes all planning and no producing.
Then the snake starts eating its own tail. The less I write, the more foreign and uninviting writing becomes. I avoid it by thinking about it harder, which leaves me with even less writing.
For me, sitting down and writing even two sentences can snap me back into doing. That’s a way to begin interrupting the cycle. Finishing a piece gives me something more: a loop that closes and a reminder that I can do this.
Planning and worldbuilding can be useful. I’m describing the point where, in my own experience, they become ways to avoid making the thing.
Change the unit you’re measuring
If novels are the only things that count as finished work, it can take a very long time to get one completion.
Keep writing the novel if that’s what you want to make. But give yourself smaller finished pieces to count too.
- A creature description: 100 words about one creature.
- A scene: one page of one scene, finished as the piece you set out to write.
- Flash fiction: a small story with a beginning, middle and end.
- A character’s journal entry: one entry written in that character’s voice.
- A myth: a small piece from your invented world.
- A letter: something one character writes to another.
These aren’t all the same kind of writing. The flash-fiction story has a beginning, middle and end; the creature description doesn’t need to become a whole story. Finish the kind of piece you chose.
And if you don’t know your character well enough to write their journal entry yet, try it anyway. Be intuitive. You can discover something about them by writing.
You don’t have to finish building the entire world before you can finish one thing from it.
Your homework: 200 words about a ghost ship
If you want to try this but don’t know what to choose, here’s your assignment: write 200 words about a ghost ship.
Finish it. Give yourself that small piece you can call done.
In the recording, I also invite listeners to email their finished piece. That’s the invitation given in this episode. To share your piece now, use the Contact page.
I said I’d write one myself too, then immediately got tangled up in whether I’d email it to myself or put it somewhere on social media. I don’t understand how the internet works anymore.
For now, make the ghost ship exist on the page. See what finishing it does for you.
If the novel itself feels too large for what you’re learning right now, Why You Should Stop Writing Your Novel explores trying a smaller whole-story draft. Here, the invitation is to finish small pieces alongside your larger work.
Fiction Writer’s Toolshed: Practical Tools for Authors is a Make Exist podcast hosted by Tim Kearney. It offers hands-on training for fiction writers to diagnose writing problems, build their skills, and finish more work.