On finishing
In real life no one is cheering.
Today I am celebrating a major milestone. I have FINISHED WRITING MY FIRST CALL OF CTHULHU SCENARIO.
To be clear: I actually haven’t finished (and I’m not really celebrating either, if I’m being honest). But what I have done is complete the second draft of my first contribution to the Call of Cthulhu community publishing program, the Miskatonic Repository.
There’s a lot more to do, including layout and proofing. I still need stats for a few NPCs and to create some precious clues for investigator handouts. But the scenario itself and its branching narratives are play tested and complete.
But this is a real milestone for me. As a communications professional, I generate thousands of words every week and hit deadline after deadline, but I have never once completed a personal creative writing project of this scale or complexity.
This started over a year ago, while tooling around with the first 25,000 words of a novel. The going was slow, thanks to my own toxic cocktail of perfectionism and procrastination – perfcrastinism.
In contrast, I was having a blast running Call of Cthulhu for randoms at my friendly local game store, stitching together old ‘80s and ‘90s Gaslight Era scenarios into an episodic campaign. The creative outlet came because frankly, some of those older published works weren’t very good.
A friend suggested I try to do better, so full of hubris, I dove in.
At the time I was acutely aware of the many similar Word documents sitting unfinished on my hard drive, expecting the same thing would happen again. But instead, long after the initial enthusiasm dwindled, despite a crushing moment when I realised much of what I’d written was useless, and in the face of an embarrassingly bad play test, I actually fucking finished it.
Like most people, I have queued to get Neil Gaiman’s autograph. Writing this in 2024 I hesitate to even mention his name, but at the time he was enjoying the middling success of Beowulf (“Oi am here to kill your mon-STAH!”) and I will always treasure The Sandman comics. My six seconds in his presence yielded only what I later learned was his stock answer to requests for advice from would-be writers.
Write.
Finish things.
Those three words remain some of the best writing advice I have ever heard. I rank them alongside a quote from Tom Robbins, whose Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas spoke to me during a pleasantly confusing time in my life.
Inspiration is for amateurs.
Taken together, this near-haiku of writing advice set a bar for what I always knew I had to do. Despite their brevity, these words say so much about the long, lonely hours of diligence needed to summon and complete the writing. Sadly, it’s not about how good your ideas are or the first rush of excitement that comes with them. Like the thrill of a new love affair, it simply doesn’t last.
Perhaps – and this is a strange idea – it’s not even really about how good the writing itself really is? That would explain why so many shit books are published. They are written by bad writers who can at least finish things!
For me, a fat and comfortable middle-aged man trying to find a creative voice to give purpose to the second half of his life, I finally understand it’s about enjoying the act of writing itself, for no reason other than the joy of making something that wasn’t there before, as well as you can.
But who am I to give advice? I haven’t even finished!