Courage: To Finish

As I've been thinking about my writing over the past weeks,  its begun to solidify in my mind that while last year often focused on practicing "pieces" of writing, working at getting at the details or the minutia of the image, this year I need to be working on taking that smaller work and growing it to finished, whatever it looks like for that particular piece or story .

The picture above is a collage style vision board on the process of finishing a story from beginning rough drafts and fluid floating ideas at the bottom to finished story at the top...  I didn't have this particular idea in mind when I started; I was thinking about the word courage as I selected photos from a stack of discarded magazines from work simply by what appealed to me emotionally. I made the cards, arranged them how I felt they worked visually, and then sat back in surprise to find it speaks far more clearly than I have so far been able to articulate to myself in words.

 I also have to confess that I stole the idea for using tags from the textile artist Karen Thiessen of Canada. She was a presenter at the recent Mennonite Arts Weekend. Look for more thoughts and inspiration on her work in my upcoming round of posts on process titled "Scratchpad". I also mentioned her here in an assignment for the (free!!!!) CalArts' A History of Art for Artists, Gamers, and Animators.


Addendum 3/7/14  Came across this great blog post on just this topic.  Thought I'd add it here in case anyone else is struggling with finishing things.   How To Complete Every Writing Project You Start: Become a Completion Addict