Pack your bag

Notes from Sarah Campbell | Mar. 10, 2021
Tactics for finishing. Thought experiments for quitting.
Stories—and secrets—of people who completed difficult things.

"Unlike finishing, I haven’t given much thought to starting or continuing. They either seem to 1) happen or 2) don’t happen. Finishing, on the other hand, requires a systematic approach.

For the past 8 years or so (since my youngest daughter entered grade school), when I feel I am about to finish something I have been working on for a good while, I leave my house, my kids, my dogs, my chickens, my cat, my dirty dishes, my dirty laundry, my students, my committees, my garden, my friends, anything and everything that might demand something of me.

For a few days, I rent a place so that I might be alone with my work. Generally, I find somewhere cheap and nearby, somewhere without distractions, somewhere with a bed and a modest kitchen. It doesn’t have to be far from my own home, but it does have to be kept secret. I bring eggs and nuts and whatever produce will go bad (if I am not home to push it on my loved ones, it will wither). I always bring at least one suitcase full of books (most of which remain unread) and a printed copy of the almost-finished project.

I shuffle pages, move pages, spread pages around, read pages aloud. I listen for hesitations. I have learned that certain hesitations mean something—ordering isn’t quite right, lineation isn’t quite right, sectioning isn’t quite right. I keep going back to those places, cutting, moving, adding, etc. until I land on a version that I feel is a little less not-quite-right than previous versions.

If all goes well, when it is time to go home, I leave with something I decide is finished, or close to finished. Since I won’t have another opportunity to escape obligations again for quite some time, the only thing left to do is to send the less-not-quite-right work into the world in hopes that someone will welcome it.”

This system may seem like a hard retreat to pull off—especially if you’ve never tried anything like it before or if, like Sasha, you’re a working parent. But consider its advantages: dedicated time away to focus on nothing else means you’ll cover more ground in a shorter period of time. What would otherwise take months done piecemeal instead takes place over a condensed set of days.

It also presents the chance for long stretches of “flow.” For some people, working without interruption in isolation is ultimately the only way to make significant progress on a complicated project.

"Twilight means
the great between,

but there is more to day
than dark and light

more to twi-

than half or twice. ..."

--> From Sasha's recent book, Everything Awake, which she describes as being written "by an insomniac" and "finished by a (relatively) well-rested human." Read her description of writing this book while undertaking Sleep Restriction Therapy at Finish It on Instagram.

Pack your bag, you're going away to get it done