The case for unfinished things

In the bottom drawer of my desk there is a scarf that is fourteen inches long. It is meant to be about sixty. The yarn is a muddy green I chose because it was on sale and because, standing in the shop, I convinced myself it looked like moss. The needles are still in it. It has been in that drawer for three winters, and every time I open the drawer to look for batteries, it looks back at me with an expression I can only describe as patient.

I am supposed to feel bad about this scarf. The culture around making — whether the thing being made is a novel, a cabinet, a sourdough starter or a side business — has a firm opinion on the matter. Finish what you start. Ship it. Done is better than perfect. These are not bad instincts, exactly. But they share a hidden assumption: that the value of a thing lives entirely at its end, and that everything before the end is a debt you carry until you pay it off.

I want to argue, gently, that this is wrong. Or at least incomplete in an interesting way.

Start with drafts, because writers are the people most obsessed with them and most embarrassed by them. Anyone who writes keeps a folder of abandoned beginnings. Mine has a few dozen: an essay about bus timetables that stops after four paragraphs, a story about a woman who repairs umbrellas that never gets her out of the shop, a long note that opens with “The thing about bridges is” and then, wisely, stops. For years I treated that folder as a graveyard. Now I think of it as a pantry. Nothing in it is dead. It is stored.

Here is the practical evidence. Almost every piece I have finished in the last decade contains a sentence, an image or a structural idea that I first tried somewhere else and abandoned. The umbrella repairer turned up, three years later, as a single paragraph in a piece about a market. The bus timetable essay gave me the opening line for something entirely unrelated. The unfinished thing did not fail. It simply did its work early, and waited for the rest of me to catch up.

There is a second argument, and it is less about efficiency. An unfinished thing is honest about something a finished thing hides: the decisions. A completed sweater looks inevitable. A half-knitted one shows you the place where the pattern changed, the row where the tension tightened because the knitter was watching something stressful on television, the dropped stitch picked up two inches later. Sketchbooks are the clearest case. The painting on the wall tells you what the artist chose. The sketchbook tells you what they considered — three versions of the same hand, the horizon moved up and then back down, a note in the margin that just says “no.”

I find that second kind of information more useful, and frankly more moving. When I visit someone’s workshop, I am less interested in the finished pieces on the shelf than in the bench, where something is clamped halfway through becoming itself. You learn how a person thinks by watching what they leave undone.

The obvious objection is that this is a fancy excuse for not finishing anything. Fair. Some unfinished things are abandoned out of boredom or fear, and calling them “stored” is a story we tell to feel better. I own a guitar I bought to learn on and did not learn on. It is not a pantry. It is a guitar.

So the case I am making is narrower than it might sound. It is not that unfinished things are better than finished ones. It is that stopping is a decision with its own value, and that we have trained ourselves to see it only as a failure of nerve. Sometimes you stop because the thing has given you what it had. Sometimes you stop because you have learned the idea was smaller than it looked from outside. Sometimes life arrives — a move, a child, a new job, a season of grief — and the needles go into the drawer. None of these is the same as quitting.

There is also a quieter pleasure in the unfinished, which is that it keeps a door open. A finished thing closes. That is its job. Once the last row is cast off, the scarf is the scarf; there is nothing more it can become. My fourteen inches of moss-colored wool are still, technically, anything. They could be a scarf. They could be unraveled and knitted into a hat. They could become, as my partner suggested, an extremely specific coaster. As long as the needles stay in, there is a small, live possibility in the drawer, and I have come to like having it there.

What would change if we took this seriously? A few small things, I think. We might stop apologizing for our drawers and folders. We might date our drafts and keep them, instead of deleting them in fits of embarrassment. We might look at a friend’s half-built boat in the garage, or the half-painted wall in the hallway, and ask what they have learned so far instead of asking when it will be done. The second question is rarely kind. The first is almost always interesting.

And we might allow ourselves to finish things on a different schedule from the one we are told to keep. Some projects take a weekend. Some take a decade, in bursts, with long silences in between. The silences are part of it. They are where the thing sits in the dark and becomes something you could not have planned.

I will probably finish the scarf. Possibly this winter, possibly not. When I do, I suspect I will be a little sorry — not about the scarf, which will be fine, if slightly muddy, but about losing the thing it was while it waited. For now it stays in the drawer next to the batteries: fourteen inches of a decision I have not yet made.