Finishing a piece of writing is not what the productivity literature suggests it will be. The advice — celebrate your wins, acknowledge the achievement, feel proud of what you’ve done — assumes that finishing produces a clear positive emotion that needs to be recognised and reinforced. Sometimes it does. More often, the experience of finishing is more complicated than that, and the complication is worth paying attention to.

The most common feeling at the end of a piece, in my experience, is not satisfaction. It is something closer to deflation — a sudden absence of the pressure that the unfinished piece had been exerting. The piece was taking up space: in the mind during other activities, in the early hours of the morning, in the gap between one task and the next. When it is done, that space empties. The relief is real, but so is the strangeness of the empty space.

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