The question

How do you tell when a piece of work is done?

Originally asked

The Creative Independent, to working artists, its interview series

A repeated process question in The Creative Independent, asked across visual art, music, writing, performance, and mixed media.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

António Lobo Antunes

Novelist and psychiatrist

Recorded said elsewhere, not written here
A book is finished when it does not want me to work on it any longer...it reaches a point when it feels like it is literally avoiding me. I have a very physical relationship with the manuscript, almost a corps à corps. Paradoxically, when I finally feel at ease with a manuscript, with its voices, I realize it is finished. I see a book as a living organism, with its own rules and will. What matters to me is to allow it to grow and to acquire an existence of its own. It’s as if the book uses me in order to come into existence, rather than being written.

Alessandro Cassin, Geography? It Doesn't Exist: Antonio Lobo Antunes with Alessandro Cassin, The Brooklyn Rail, 1 November 2008 source ↗

Others on this question

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Kazuo Ishiguro Novelist and screenwriter; Nobel laureate in Literature, 2017
It’s funny you say that because I never have this moment when I feel, “Ah, I’ve finished!” I watch footballers at the end of the match, you know, the whistle goes and they’ve won or lost. Until then they’ve been giving everything and at that moment they know it’s over. It’s funny for an author. There’s never a finishing whistle. It’s not very spectacular.
Recorded The Talks, 14 October 2015 source ↗
Loraine James British electronic producer and musician
Most EPs I’ve done have just been for fun, Bandcamp stuff, so I just stop when…I guess with EPs, it’s easier. It’s like, “Oh, EPs are usually four or five songs.” I know it will end within that bracket.
Recorded Max Freedman, The Creative Independent interview source ↗
Koho Yamamoto Sumi-e painter, calligrapher and teacher
Well, I feel it. If I don’t feel it just the way I want it, then I’d rather destroy it than to keep it.
Recorded Amanda Millet-Sorsa, Koho Yamamoto with Amanda Millet-Sorsa, The Brooklyn Rail, 1 April 2022 source ↗

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