Most People Do Not Stop Making Things. They Just Stop, and Nobody Knows.

Of the people whose work I followed closely ten years ago, most stopped. Almost none announced it. The pattern is nearly universal: the gaps lengthen, there is a post apologising for the gap and promising more soon, another gap, and then nothing. I have done this myself twice.

I want to make a case for ending things out loud, and the case is not primarily about the audience.

For the audience, an unannounced stop is a mild thing. People notice within a few weeks, wonder briefly, and move on. The cost there is real but small.

The cost to the person is larger and lasts longer. An unannounced stop is not an ending; it is a suspension, and a suspension does not close. I carried one of mine for about three years as a low-grade obligation — a thing I was going to get back to, that I thought about with a small unpleasant feeling roughly monthly, and that prevented me from starting anything similar because the unfinished one was in the way. When I eventually wrote four sentences saying it was over, the relief was completely out of proportion to the act.

The second cost is that the suspension distorts what you learn. A project that ends explicitly can be assessed: what worked, what did not, whether to do it again. A project that trails off cannot, because you never establish whether it failed or you did. I spent years with a vague sense that I had been insufficiently disciplined, and when I finally looked at it properly the honest answer was that the thing had run its course after four years and I had been trying to sustain something that was complete.

What I would suggest, having got this right once out of three attempts: the ending post does not have to be good, and specifically it does not have to explain. My successful one was four sentences: this is finished, thank you, here is where the archive lives, I am not planning to return. No reasons. Every draft where I tried to give reasons became long, self-justifying and impossible to finish, which is exactly how the previous two never got written.

The other thing is that it is much easier to write when you are not in the worst of it. Both of my unannounced stops happened during a bad period, and writing anything at all during a bad period was the problem. If there is any point at which you notice you are considering stopping and are not currently miserable, that is the moment, and it will feel premature, and premature is the only version of this that gets written.

I would add one thing for anyone on the other side, reading this about someone whose work you miss. The gap is very rarely about the audience and you are very rarely owed an explanation, and the kindest available reading — that a person had enough, and did not know how to say so — is almost always the correct one.