There’s two desires that motivate creativity: There’s the desire to create, to pour a part of yourself into crafting art by some sort of cathartic action; and there’s the desire to have created, to have generated some idea, given it form, and put it out into the world. For a while now I’ve thought of the latter as an obstacle, as something which solely distracts from the necessary creative work. I’ve tried to cultivate in myself a love of the process, a love of doing the work rather than just impatiently wanting the work to be done, but I’ve discovered that the other edge of that sword is that I often don’t actually want to finish.
The gap between these two positions can be tough to straddle, since when what you want is to have made something the actual process of making it is interminable and agonizing, and when all you want is to work it becomes all practice with no actual output, nothing to show for it when you’re done (which you never are). Though it’s tricky, learning to be both of these people at the same time, or at least interchangeably, is one of the core skills of being an independent artist. This is, perhaps, one of the reasons why most games are made by teams: That way some people can care about getting the project done and some people can care about doing the project, and hopefully by some miracle of communication between them actual progress happens.
When you get down to it, most art can be worked on indefinitely: Completion is just deciding a good place to cut the string, a good place to declare “happily ever after” in preference to the meandering complications of a long life and inevitable death long after the demands of narrative satisfaction have withered. “Art is not finished, only abandoned” they say – but, if so, we must have a plan for when and how to abandon it if we are ever to escape its gravity.
This only gets more challenging as the scope of the work increases. When I’m doing a painting, after a certain point I can just say “okay, that looks fine to me” and drop it. Now, I may come back later, see all the mistakes I left in and want to pick it back up again, and sometimes I even go ahead and do that, but I at least get the closure of declaring completion, get the sense that I can move on to other work without leaving something else important undone. It’s probably helpful to tell myself, then, something similar to another paraphrased quote of confusing provenance: “Finishing this will be easy; after all, I’ve finished it dozens of times already.”
As with walking, it is necessary to both look at where you’re putting your feet, because otherwise you will fall in a ravine, and look ahead of you, because otherwise you will walk into traffic. You can’t paint a forest without painting the trees: You can’t understand the tree without understanding its place in the forest.