“I have ninety-seven notebooks in a wooden box […] I work on the principle that there is no failed work, only work pending: that there is nothing I won’t say, only what I haven’t said yet.”

— Hilary Mantel, 2016

If tragic heroes are what happens when people don’t give up, does that mean that giving up belongs to a comic world?

‘Eventually there is a failure, even the best climbers that have ever been, there’s always been the project that they didn’t do…you call it uncertainty but it’s almost like a guarantee that you will have things that you don’t climb’.

Sophia Siddique Harvey’s experience of the unfinished is the strangest - and most uplifting - that I’ve ever encountered.

If a project goes off track, stops being enjoyable, is no longer needed, or morphs into something else, then stopping or diverting to a different path can be good choices. The route may be more scenic.