The Need to See Something Finished
Last month, I seriously considered starting a woodworking project. Not because I wanted to build furniture, but because I wanted to see something finished. A shelf. A box. Anything with an edge I could run my hand along and say, “That’s done.”
I was talking with someone the other day about how all of my work, creative work, music, writing, and even the marketing technology work I do for my day job, lives entirely in the digital world. There isn’t any physical thing you watch get finished, and for me, that leads to projects feeling like they’re never complete.
You see, when a project lives in the digital world, it’s too easy to always say “I’ll go back and change this” or “tweak that later.” I have a hard drive full of unfinished songs just sitting there, waiting for someday. Some of them are even complete; technically, they just need “more tweaking.”
This thought of never being finished, never completing something, has really been sticking with me lately. So much so that I’ve thought about starting a woodworking project, just so I could see something physically completed for once. But I know that as much fun as that would be, it would just take more time away from my writing and music.
You see, when I was growing up, my father had a construction company, and he built custom homes. There’s something fulfilling about seeing something you built with your hands get finished. When you’re building a house, it’s easy to see the progress. You dig the foundation, pour the concrete, lay the block, then the framing, the roof, and so on. You physically lay your hand on it. You physically see the fruit of your work.
But even physical progress is a bit of an illusion. A house under construction can look impressive and still be behind schedule. A 600-page manuscript can be worse than a 300-page one. The visibility of progress always felt like proof of progress, even when it wasn’t really the same thing. It just feels easier to believe in something you could see.
When all of your work lives in the digital world, this gets muddled. With how long the life cycle of a project like writing a novel or a song actually is, and without that same physical sense of getting close to the end, it’s hard to see the finish line. Sure, it’s fun to watch the word count roll up, or to track your output in some app, but it’s not quite the same thing as watching a foundation get poured. Sometimes it just feels like writing a book is never-ending.
And in a strange way, it always could be. Even before computers, a writer could theoretically revise a manuscript forever. What actually stopped them wasn’t the medium, it was the cost. Retyping an entire novel by hand was expensive enough in time and effort that at some point, you just had to stop. Digital work removes that cost. There’s no friction holding you back from “one more pass.” Which means the stopping point doesn’t come from the work anymore, it has to come from you.
So I’ve been thinking about what “finished” actually looks like for something like this. What’s the life cycle of a project like writing a novel?
Side note — life cycle comes up a lot in marketing. Talk to any marketing person you know and they can bore you to death talking about life cycles.
So yeah, I’m going to talk about life cycles. Sorry, I can’t seem to stop thinking about them.
So what does the life cycle of a writing project actually look like? Something like this, maybe:
Idea → Character development → First draft → Edit → Second draft → Edit again → Beta readers → Third draft → Send to editor → Final draft → Complete.
It’s a real list. It’s roughly true. But does finishing that list actually feel like being done? I don’t think it does, at least not on its own. A checklist tells you where you are in the process. It doesn’t give you the feeling of having built something, the way watching a house go from a hole in the ground to a roof line does.
I think that’s the actual mindset shift I need to make: progress doesn’t have to be something you can see to be real. The work happening in revision three, in a scene I rewrote four times before it finally worked, in a song that’s been “almost done” for eight months, that’s all real progress, even if there’s no physical stack of pages getting taller to prove it. The life cycle gives me the stages. It doesn’t give me the feeling. I have to build that part myself.
So what does that look like in practice? A few things I want to try:
Borrow My Dad’s Inspections
On a job site, nobody moves from foundation to framing until an inspector signs off. That checkpoint is what makes the progress feel real and locked in; you’re not allowed to quietly slide backward. A beta reader, or even just a writer friend reading a chapter and saying “yeah, this works,” does the same job. It turns an invisible draft into a verified, completed stage you don’t have to second-guess anymore.
Make the Stages Smaller
“Writing a novel” is too big to ever feel finished. “Finishing chapter 6” is not. Treat every chapter, every scene, every song section as its own small build with its own foundation-to-roof arc, instead of treating the whole project as one giant, never-ending pour.
Create Artifacts on Purpose
Print a draft at the end of each stage, even if you’ll never look at the printout again. Export the song as an actual audio file you can play in the car. The point isn’t the object itself; it’s giving yourself something you can physically hold or hear that says “this version is done,” before you start tearing it apart again.
Track the Shape of the Work, Not Just the Size
Word count is fine, but a version history or a visible difference between draft one and draft three shows you something more honest: how much actually changed. That’s closer to watching the walls go up than a number ticking upward.
Say It Out Loud to Someone
Telling a friend “I finished the second draft” does something a private file save doesn’t: it makes the milestone exist outside your own head, the same way a finished room exists outside your own head the moment someone else walks through it.
None of this replaces the satisfaction of a physical object. But it gets closer than staring at a word count and hoping it’s enough.
So maybe I don’t actually need the woodworking project after all. The urge behind it was never really about sawdust; it was about proof, something tangible enough to point at and say, “I made that.” But I’m starting to think proof can take other shapes. A signed-off chapter. A printed draft sitting in a drawer. A friend telling you a scene finally works.
My dad never just trusted that a house was solid because it looked finished; he had inspectors confirm it, stage by stage, until one day you could walk through the place and trust it. That’s what I’m actually building toward here: not a finished house, but enough verified stages that one day I can stand inside the finished book and trust that it’s solid too, even if I never got to watch the walls go up.