A couple of years ago, I was sitting in a creative writing workshop at my local university when the tutor made a confession. “I only give a book a handful of pages,” she said. “If it hasn’t hooked me by then, I put it down.” I thought her approach seemed a bit hasty. Who knows what lies beyond a lousy opening. What if the book gets better as it goes on? What if a slow burn blossoms into a literary marvel? “What if it doesn’t,” the tutor said to my objections. “Anyway, you’re young. You’ve got time to read to the end.”
Well, no argument on that last bit. But the thrust of her point didn’t sit well. Leaving a novel unfinished felt criminal to me, almost an insult to the author who had slaved over it. If I started something, I wanted to make good on the time I’d already invested. And if I wanted licence to form an opinion on it, surely that required reaching the finish line to see everything it had to offer?
For as long as I could remember, I’d been in the habit of ploughing through creative works I’d long since lost interest in. I was a chronic completionist who would see every middling novel, B-rating TV series and 30-hour video game through to its very end, regardless of how much enjoyment I took from it.
Yet the tutor’s comment stayed with me. My efforts had undoubtedly been wasted in the past. I’d slogged through more than 2,000 pages of Robert Jordan’s high-fantasy The Wheel of Time series on the assumption that I was supposed to like that sort of thing, only to realise its knotty lore and unpronounceable fictional nouns didn’t cut it for me. And wouldn’t it have been better, I thought in retrospect, to have dipped out of Netflix’s The Crown after Olivia Colman made her exit. Yes, I’d have missed some good Diana bits, but I’d also have saved myself from the disappointment of her ghostly reincarnation.
Such thinking wasn’t my forte. Only a year before, I’d found myself eking out John le Carré’s The Constant Gardener over months of fitful, half-hearted reading. I’d given my dad the novel for his birthday without having read it. When I got round to finishing my own copy, I took away little more than a dull understanding of the inner workings of multinational pharmaceutical companies that would rival only Dan Brown’s love for the drily bureaucratic. Regardless, I dutifully – and perhaps guiltily, though Dad did say he enjoyed the book – read to the very end.
Perhaps it was the tutor’s comments that had been working away in the background of my consciousness, but last year I finally realised that this habit of seeing everything through was becoming a colossal waste of time. Time that could have been spent watching, reading, playing, or doing something else. Something more niche, something more experimental, something better. Or, just as likely, something totally inane. Something that held no highbrow value at all, but was at least more enjoyable in the moment.
So I stopped determinedly persevering. I put my copy of Blood Meridian back on the shelf, ready for a time I’d be in the mood for a subversive western. I gave up on my idea to listen to the total discography of Frank Zappa (it peaked with Hot Rats anyway). And I uninstalled Assassin’s Creed Valhalla from my hard drive after a few hours.
Quitting did prove to be a strange mental adjustment. While sticking with something to the bitter end might take stubbornness, giving it up altogether demands its own quiet confidence; enough self-understanding to recognise something isn’t for you. Even now, closing a book midway through or uninstalling 50 gigabytes of game data doesn’t exactly feel like a success. And when I find a classic of the medium, the latest fad, or an expected delight falls flat, there’s always the lingering doubt: is it really less than it’s cracked up to be, or is it simply lost on me?
But I’ve found peace leaving my completionist tendencies behind. Admittedly, I give myself chapters, rather than pages – hours, not minutes – to enjoy the chaff. But when it starts to rot, I throw it away. And somehow, it tastes all the sweeter for it.
Callum Bains is a freelance journalist
