When you make a new thing using a collaborative iteration process, you encounter the question of closure at each iteration. And, of course, you have to decide when to quit altogether, make a choice about when you’ve got what you need or what you think they will want. Since the thing has emerged brand new from its unique making process, you get little or no help from outside: there’s nothing to compare it to, no yardstick to measure it by. You must therefore make these choices on the basis of 1) aesthetic coherence in the thing itself; and, 2) your best guess about its potential as a useful product.
This introduces you to the double-think common to artists in their work. To make a work of art, the maker or makers must consider purpose: Why am I making this thing? Any unique thing has a double purpose that guides its makers: 1) to be perfect of its kind; and, 2) to perform its task successfully.
Does that look familiar? Yup: it’s the grounds for the choice you have when you think about closure. The double-think attacks when you realize that, while you sure want to make a useful, thus saleable thing, you can’t put too much attention on that or it will distort the thing and interfere with your need to make it perfect of its kind.
To perfect a form, a maker must insist on formal perfection as the principle consideration during the making process. Every part of that process is interdependent with every other, just as every part of the thing made is interdependent with every other, so this gets complicated, hairy even. Fixing even the tiniest detail requires that you consider the whole thing.
Here’s an example from my experience of making. The script must be in the composer’s hands tomorrow, first thing. I’m nearly done. I’m at the obligatory scene in the sawmill. Fair Marcia Truepenny struggles against the ropes that tie her to the buzz saw, the blade coming ever closer. Dauntless Dick Dreadnaught thrashes on the floor in his cocoon of ropes. In his last official act before leaving, the villain sets the place on fire. Flames and smoke! I’m writing along, copying and editing and inventing the final draft.
DAUNTLESS DICK: Oh, no! We’re on fire!
FAIR MARCIA: Cough cough.
DAUNTLESS DICK: Courage, Camille!
Oh, no is right! That line just popped out of nowhere. Her name is Fair Marcia, not Camille. We’re back in the stone age: I’m writing on an actual typewriter, on actual paper. I’m on page 157 of the script. And my lizard brain has come up with a great gag: Courage, Camille!
Here’s the closure double-think problem in spades. Do I stay up all night re-typing the entire script, changing Fair Marcia to Camille? Nowadays, of course, it would take perhaps 90 seconds. Or, do I shrug, drop the gag, and press on?
Dang, that was a long night.
But to achieve closure on an innovation you must be certain of the thing’s coherence, of the arrangement of parts that creates that coherence. No Camilles hanging alone out there in the second act. It’s that arrangement, after all, that makes the thing unique, one of a kind, potentially valuable in its market. It would be so great if someone could tell us how funny the gag is going to be, or how gotta-have-it customers will find the gizmo. But no—we have to judge it on its own internal principles. And that means weighing the trouble, the extra iterations, it will take to get it perfect against the possible value it might achieve if we get it right.
This is hard.
Why we call it work, I guess.
