Completion

Stories from the Book of Completion (dedicated to every unfinished
novel ever)

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chapter one: the subject is completion.

I actually began writing this on the completion of a game of solitaire.
I picked up on solitaire's combination of introversion and repetition
to use as an accessible metaphor, for the purposes of this story. Is
this a story? Well it has a beginning, a middle and an end which only
requires your compliance to make it a story. Solitaire is a game that
has rules and objectives, like reading a story. But in a story we must
have conflict, emotional investment, layers of sub-plots. And an ending
that fulfills a need to contain the story in a closed loop of meaning.
All the four suits laid out in perfect sequences.

Johann lay on the deck of the ferry between Skiathos and Alexandria,
and was suddenly aware of this night's moment, and was clutched in it's
overwhelming seduction. The danish girl lay with her head on the crook
of his arm, her painfully innocent attractiveness pulling everything
taut inside him. She slept curled towards him, her knees pulled up to
within an inch of his hips. It was a casual proximity, the sanguine
sexless repose of a girl with lots of brothers, or other male
freindships, but it was setting off deep whorls of pride and lust
within him. The steady rolling of the ship over the Aegean sea, towards
Egypt, under a wall of stars: Her blonde hair against the tan on his
arms, the deck still carrying the heat of the day's sun, this was the
moment when Johann decided to

Have you met your life's ambitions yet? Do your relationships need to
develop any further? Have you satisfied your family, friends or lover
enough to justify your absence from them in the reading of this story?
Are they now scouring the lonely hearts columns for the words "
attentive" or "sociable"? Completion costs whether you are a writer or
a reader. It's also the mantra of film makers, writers, builders,
landscape gardeners, politicians, doctors. The beginning and middle of
this story are items on a receipt. The end, the completion, is what you
pay with. It is the platinum card of yourself.

At the moment I have two plays, two novels, a pitch for a television
programme and a series of essays to write for my girlfriend. All
incomplete. I haven't included this story, the one you are reading,
because it is already completed. With the third word of this story
"began " (chosen randomly I must point out), this story was finished.
It's going to be a story with absolutely no demand for completion, and
therefore was completed the moment I began it.

I won't have to struggle to combine sub-plots, or to pursue motifs
using evermore complicated narrative devices, or stage the delicate
superlayering of backstory and character insight. This story won't be
leading me into character cul-de-sacs, where you find yourself staring
in horror, right through the transparency of a character, about fifty
thousand words in. As certain as I can be, this story is already
completed.

This is dedicated to all the non-completed stories, and therefore the
writers too, that have never graced or impuned themselves on our
collective awareness. In those half-fashioned jottings, manuscripts and
chapters, there is a story so human that it hurts. An upopened sack of
concrete in a basement, that has solidified into a hard rock: The
completed form for life insurance, that lies under a cushion, now
shaped to the profile of the uninsured buttocks that sit on it: The
post-it, post-adhesive after all this time, that lives in a drawer with
the tools that came with the self-assembly furniture(completed), which
bears the name and telephone number of the best friend who mysteriously
lost their allure when you discovered drugs, or travel, or a lover who
actually meant something. These are the characters of this story, not
in some kitsch celebration of quotidien failures, but as a means of
exploring the gap between potential, and realisation. This zone of
self-thwarted ambition is my dominion.
" Write what you know " is what they told me at university (which
incidentally I failed to finish at the very last hurdle). And this is
what I know, completion, and how it evades me.

But this story, this fabulous ground-breaking experiment, was completed
just after I began it, and I have broken the chain. Come on, let's find
out how I did it. There may be some vital clues for others in similar
non-completionary situations. Let's complete.

The five rules of completion:

1 Set yourself credible and relevant targets
2 Identify your goal
3 Map out your schedule
4 Assign the necessary resources
5 Set yourself credible and relevant targets

These rules have always served me well in addressing my goals. Although
this list has helped in addressing my goals, they have never served me
in actually meeting them. The act of making the list is itself a
failure.. Those of you who might comment sardonically that the last
item on the list is just the first item repeated; I say you haven't
read the list properly. You have to really look at how items one to
four are structured, item five is there specifically to take us back to
the beginning. In creating a loop like this I have intended to capture
the cylcical nature of the quest for completion. Nobody completes like
a list-maker, that's what I believe, and a looped-list maker even more
so. It is how modern corporations function so efficiently, by
acknowledging the looped-list as a way of life.

Johann lay on the deck of the ferry between Skiathos and Alexandria,
and was suddenly aware of this night's moment, and was clutched in it's
overwhelming seduction. The danish girl lay with her head on the crook
of his arm, her painfully innocent attractiveness pulling everything
taut inside him. She slept curled towards him, her knees pulled up to
within an inch of his hips. It was a casual proximity, the sanguine
sexless repose of a girl with lots of brothers, or other male
freindships, but it was setting off deep whorls of pride and lust
within him. The steady rolling of the ship over the Aegean sea, towards
Egypt, under a wall of stars: Her blonde hair against the molasses tan
on his arms, the deck still carrying the heat of the day's sun, this
was the moment when Johann decided to

Completion. It seems so impossible. So impossible.

I use the dictionary to check words, I am an autodidact, and so the
dictionary is my constant familiar. I use words, then find out their
meanings. This means that I learn as I write, but what I need to learn
about completion is not in the dictionary. But it does provide a clue.
The dictionary is not complete. It never will be, new words emerge and
new spellings, new levels of acceptance for the coloquial for example.
So it is with my stories, new inspirations, new ambitions, new levels
of acceptance all around me, in my everyday. This week I accept that I
am old, this week I accept that I am not such a great father, lover or
worker. So, like the dictionary, I can't accept that this is the only
story, the only expression, the only thing to write.

Johann decided to: Rape the girl? Leave his job at the European
Parliament? Get a haircut? Give up the priesthood? Turn his brother
into the police? Reveal that he is an alien from the planet Gaar?
Arrest the girl for terrorism offences and embark on a cruel and
complex relationship with her as she stands on trial for her life? I
don't know. I was adrift on the scene, a terribly unprofessional
reaction for a writer, but inescapable, this betrayal of the reader. By
becoming both the writer and the reader, I reveal my duality. I cannot
collect, or furnish myself with, an intellectual purity to act as the
building blocks of my writing. I live in a duality, and this is why I
can't complete.

The end of this bit.