Back to Issue Seventeen

"Requirements" by Jill Golick

Requirements

You have to finish, Alan said, quoting Greco, his mentor. Alan finished everything. Every single poem, essay and story he wrote. And then he published them, himself. Having parléed a parttime product management gig for a major publisher into his own micro publishing house. Because every word that came out of his metaphoric pen deserved to published. And Alan certainly didn’t need some gatekeeper to tell him that.

She wanted to fling her own pages into the trash, except there’s no drama at all to clicking the delete key. Every word came out like thick toffee, oozing slowly and seeming to stick to her fingers reluctant to remain on the page. Alan would tell her to get back to her morning pages, that she’s neglecting her meditation practice, that he warned her about cheap dopamine.

At first, she’d thought she was on to something. The whole piece had just come to her. Not a mere glimpse of character or a few beats of a scene. No, the whole thing had popped into her head like some kind of miracle; a begining, an end, Eleanor fully formed, along with everything that held her back and what it would take for her to change before she’d get what she want, even the colour and smell of the world she inhabited. It all just exploded into her head creating the energy she’d used to blast out the first 50 pages.

Then it got slower. A little viscus at first till it had become the thick toffee that now refused to even flow from her brain to the page.

It isn’t that it wasn’t working. It was. The prose wasn’t terrible. The characters were real enough that they were spouting dialogue that surprised her. And the strength of the structure was starting to take over, gaining momentum, driving Eleanor inevitably toward the absolute worst in order to reward her with the absolute best. A dozen more drafts and it could almost be good.

But she did not want to finish. She had begun to loath Eleanor. She didn't want to spend another hour with her, let alone the weeks it would take to get to a polished draft.

You have to finish what you start, Alan told her, Greco says its how an artist honours his work. If you don’t finish, you aren’t an artist.

But fuck Greco, she thought, Pirkei Avot specifically says otherwise. Her index finger poised on the mouse, the cursor hovering over the delete button. But she stopped herself, knowing that there was more to the saying. You don’t have to finish the work, but you can’t ignore it.

So she scrolled back and reread, gagging when she noticed that Eleanor had begun to quote Alan. She’d thought she was writing herself into Eleanor but the traitorous character had somehow morphed into him. And now she was writing Alan toward the ultimate happy ending.

It was good advice. Not Greco’s. Pirkei Avot. If she had ignored it she wouldn’t have realized she was absolved from finishing. She had her own work to do.

She pressed delete. On Alan.