Art is never done

the dance between perfection and progress

When is a piece of work truly done? For a decade, I have used this maxim as a way of navigating my creative work “ Art is never done, it is just abandoned”. It has served me well, but now I feel more and more discontent with the idea of abandoning something I am creating. Early in my creative journey, I always use to get trapped in perfectionism, trying to add one last thing, possibly because it was scary to put things out there. But as I have grown I realised that the instinct to add is often much more grounded in an insight that will make the piece better. At the same time I do want to publish more and put out more things, I want to use my work, my art, my writing as explorations of things. But at some point you have put a final line and just say “its done” “put it out now”. And so the biggest dilemma, “when is a piece of work done?”

The tension here isnt just about getting it done. It is also about what finishing even means. Is it clarity? Compromise? Courage?

The honest temptation in many many cases is to keep floating between ideas, to not push things out there. Especially with certain things that are physical, iteration often means making a new thing, what you’ve once made is done.

I have this idea that one day I will make a game? piece? comic? something, that feels like a child’s dream version of floating through unknown lands. Something that is an exploration of the feelings of wonder and curiosity and how the roads outside leads to inside. But everytime I start working on it, in one form or the other, it feels wrong. So, I keep returning to the drawing board uncertain if these feelings are creative insights or creation anxieties. A large part of the challenge with this particular piece is that I dont know how many thematic elements I want to include, and what all do I want to deeply explore.

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What is too much? This past week, I experienced this incredible game, 1000xresist, which if you are ever even remotely interested in games or narrative experiences, i cannot recommend hard enough. One thing that majorly stood out to me was the fact that the narrative and thematic scope of the game is expansive, it deals with the ideas of identity, trust, care, choice, resistance, individualism, collectivism, death, intergenerational trauma, belonging, love and much much more. It is set in a sci-fi world and it has several elements that can only be described as magic realism.

All of that sounds like a LOT right? And it is a lot, but also, it feels like it belongs. It fits, all of it fits. Which made me question, how often the idea of you must “murder your darlings” when it comes to creating things devoid of the essence that made the thing special in the first place.

After digesting 1000xresist, one thing that did make things clear for me, is that part of the reason why it can have such intense narrative depth is also because the visuals, beautiful as they are, are not trying to do too much, They did not go for hyper realism in the visuals. The gameplay is also rather minimal, and so if one were to imagine the experiential space, majority is taken up by the story, theme and narrative, and everything else plays a supporting cast role to these central pieces.

Which to me feels like, when you know with clarity what you are trying to do, you can focus and increase the depth and density of that which matters to you and you can make the rest as minimal as they would be necessary. But its not always to know from the beginning what you’re trying to do.

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When I started this substack, I was thinking I will use this as a space to revise my “how of creative work” series. A series of instagram posts I did 5 years back. As I go more and more into writing though, I feel like the things that felt important to me at that point, while they are still true, they aren't as deeply resonant anymore. Like this week, my thought is how much is too much to add in a piece of work? And how does one determine when they have done enough. When they have written what needed to be written. Where is the finish line for any piece one creates.

A couple weeks back, I wrote about procrastination, and it really helped me understand my relationship with perfectionism deeply, and as I write this, I am very aware of the fact that I am not trying to write the best first draft. That happened because I went through it deeply. On the other hand, I had a successful playtest of the game that i had mentioned in the same article, and that game definitely came less from a need to explore anything super deep and much more from wanting to explore a form and seeing whether and how people would connect to it.

My current working definition for the finish line, if one can call it that is the line where I will end the work. At somepoint in the process of writing a piece, I understand what is the central tension in the article, like for the procrastination piece was my high productivity on one project and extremely poor productivity on another project. So I continue writing until I find that tension, and then I just build the article around that tension. Even still the tension between desire to add more to make a piece better, and adding more just for indulgence is real.

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There is this part of me that says, just write something that is more approachable, more understandable. More readable. The biggest challenge, or the tussle I feel like is between the ideas of “ gaining clarity of thought” vs. “having clarity of expression”. One side says, the more I create things that ask interesting questions, I will find myself in a clearer space of understanding things that fascinate me, that matter to me. On the other hand if I focus on clarity of expression, I will find more connection with people who are outside of me. So the struggle becomes one of balancing authenticity with connection.

There is inherent appeal in clarity of thought for me. I absolutely love thinking about things, after all I called my podcast thinking on thinking, I love understanding parts of myself more deeply and I absolutely love when I can find depth in places I didnt expect. But I also know that there is a plateau one hits when one is working on one project/ piece for too long. When the ideas, and the depth you can achieve with them stagnates. So then what? One should just create for expression? for communication? I also don't know honestly, because without enough clarity of thought, often times creating for expression devolves into trying to “make what people will like”.

It’s almost like both of these are tidal forces and whatever I am trying to create will just churn out of the battle between the two. And I wonder how often the reason why things even ever get done is because the need to build connection becomes larger than needling the wound of authenticity deeper.

With these articles also, I have a strange system, I work on multiple articles over the course of a week, and eventually by the time wednesday rolls around, I know that something or the other will have an idea in the “formed” and then I just need to carry it from where it is at to the finish line. Even after 15 years of making things I think it is still a just an abstract sense where the finish line is.

How do you figure out when your creative projects are “done”?

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