The Half-Finished Drawer: Giving Abandoned Work a Fair Hearing

The drawer is the bottom one, the one that sticks unless you lift it slightly while pulling. Inside: three scripts with coffee rings on the title page, a prop bird made from a wire coat hanger and a shredded copy of the Radio Times, four sketchbooks with pages torn out, and a small cardboard box labelled “bits for later” in handwriting I no longer recognise as mine. It is not a glamorous archive. But it is not a failure log either, though for a long time I treated it as one.

British winters are good for this sort of reckoning. The dark arrives at four in the afternoon and suddenly there is no pretending you might get to the allotment or the park. The kettle goes on, the radiator clanks, and you find yourself on the floor with a mug of Yorkshire Tea, surrounded by evidence of your own good intentions. That is not necessarily a comfortable place to be. But it is a useful one.

The drawer is not a failure log

I used to think unfinished work was a personality flaw with a paper trail. Every abandoned script was a reminder that I had got excited, told people about it, bought a new notebook for it, and then quietly let it slide. The half-built prop — a seagull for a show that never happened — was worse. It sat there looking accusatory, like a parrot with a grudge.

What changed, slowly, was the language I used. Calling these things “failures” made them heavy. Calling them “unfinished” made them sound like a to-do list I was avoiding. The word that has helped most is “dormant”. Not dead, necessarily. Just not currently growing. A dormant thing might wake up. A dead thing needs compost. Both are fine, but they require different handling.

Three piles, one kettle

My winter review ritual is deliberately low-tech. No spreadsheet, no colour-coded labels, no app that syncs to the cloud and then asks me to pay a subscription. I empty the drawer onto the floor, put the kettle on again, and make three piles.

Past it. This is work that no longer interests me. Not because it was bad, but because the person who started it was asking a different question. The script about a haunted launderette is genuinely not something I want to finish now. Into the recycling with the draft, but I might keep one page — the scene where the tumble dryer starts humming a hymn — because that bit still has a pulse.

Dormant. This is work I would still make if the conditions were right. The conditions are almost never right, which is why it has been in the drawer for two years. But I can write down what those conditions would be: a cast of two, a running time under fifty minutes, no need for a lighting rig. That is useful information. It turns a vague guilt into a specific brief.

Genuinely done. This is the smallest pile, and the most confusing. Sometimes a thing is finished even though it never got staged, published or posted. A sketchbook page can be complete as a thought. A prop can be complete as a test. The seagull, it turns out, was a good afternoon’s work and a bad idea for a touring show. That is allowed.

What dormant work is actually for

The mistake I made for years was assuming unfinished work should either be finished or forgotten. But a portfolio is not a trophy cabinet. It is a record of how you think. The dormant pile is proof that you have more ideas than time, which is not a problem to solve — it is a condition of making anything at all.

Some of those half-built things become raw material. The wire seagull has turned up in two workshops as an example of how to make a puppet from whatever is in the cupboard under the stairs. A stalled script about a village hall committee became a fifteen-minute piece for a scratch night, once I stopped trying to make it a full evening. The sketchbook pages with the torn-out middles taught me that I draft by deleting, which is not a moral failing but a method.

And some of them are just there to remind me that I tried. That is not nothing. In a culture that wants every hobby to become a side hustle and every sketch to become a post, there is something quietly rebellious about keeping work that never found an audience. It is yours. It does not owe anyone a finished version.

The portfolio question

If you keep a portfolio under your own name — as I do, with all the odd accounting that comes with it — the unfinished work raises a practical question. Do you show it? My answer is: selectively, and with a caption. A finished piece says “here is what I made”. A dormant piece can say “here is what I am still thinking about”. Those are different offers, and both can be honest.

I have started including one or two “work in progress” notes on my site, not as an apology but as context. A photograph of the seagull with a line about why it never flew tells a visitor more about my process than another polished headshot ever could. It also quietly signals that the finished things did not arrive fully formed, which is useful for anyone who is currently staring at their own stuck drawer.

A small, honest sort

The ritual does not need to be grand. Mine takes about an hour and a half, including the second cup of tea and the bit where I get distracted by an old bus ticket. The point is not to emerge with a clean studio and a five-year plan. The point is to give the work a fair hearing, so it stops being a vague weight in the background and becomes something you can name.

Dead work gets composted. Dormant work gets a note. Finished-but-unseen work gets a bit of respect. And the drawer goes back in, a little lighter, ready for whatever half-built thing comes next. Outside, the light is already going. Inside, the kettle is still warm. That is enough for a Tuesday in November.