I bought it for fifty pence from the Oxfam shop on Abbeydale Road, the one next to the card shop that always smells of potpourri and mild regret. A paperback copy of Birdsong — already dog-eared, spine cracked in that particular way that suggests someone read it in the bath. Tucked between pages 201 and 202, where the trenches get very dark indeed, was a folded sheet of newspaper. The Telegraph Quick Crossword, printed on a Tuesday. The date was from 2016.
Someone had started it in biro. Blue biro, the kind you find in multipacks from Wilko, the kind that skip if you write too fast. Seven across was filled in — ‘AERIAL’ — and then something went wrong. The letters didn’t fit with two down. A confident hand had written ‘ORACLE’ in the wrong place, then crossed it out with a single firm line. Not scribbled over. Just struck through, with the restraint of someone who makes mistakes neatly. Five down was attempted, abandoned, attempted again. The top-right corner remained entirely blank, three clues untouched. And in the top-left corner, where the Telegraph leaves a small white rectangle for your name, someone had written ‘Margaret’ in the same blue biro, same hand, same pressure.
I stood in the shop holding the book open at that page, breathing in the particular mustiness of secondhand paper and old newsprint, and I felt something I couldn’t quite name. Not sadness, exactly. Something closer to the feeling you get when you find a shopping list in a borrowed coat pocket — that sudden, illicit intimacy of encountering a stranger’s handwriting, their thought made physical, their small private act of cognition preserved on paper that was never meant to last.
Margaret’s crossword is not a great work. It’s not a diary or a letter or a photograph. It is a Tuesday afternoon’s mild intellectual exertion, abandoned partway through, folded into a novel about the First World War, and eventually donated to a charity shop in Sheffield where a man with too many notebooks bought it for less than the price of a bus ticket. But it is, in its way, a portrait. A portrait of a specific afternoon — the light coming through a specific window, the cup of tea going cold on a specific table, the specific moment when Margaret lost interest or was interrupted or simply decided she’d had enough. It is a record of a person sitting with something and choosing, in the end, not to finish it.
I’ve kept it in the book, between pages 201 and 202, for two years now. I haven’t finished the crossword. I don’t intend to. The blank squares are part of the thing — the spaces where Margaret’s attention lapsed, or where the phone rang, or where she looked up and noticed it was getting dark and she hadn’t started the tea. The incompleteness is the story.
What strikes me, standing in my flat on a rainy Wednesday with Margaret’s crossword on the kitchen table and a mug of tea going cold in my own hand, is how rare it is to encounter an object that so plainly admits its own incompletion. We live surrounded by things that pretend to be finished — the completed diary entry, the fully watched film, the read book, the solved puzzle — and we perform our own completion constantly, presenting ourselves to the world as people who follow through, who close the loop, who get things done. But the truth, which we all know and never say, is that most of what matters is left half-done. The conversation that ended before the important part. The letter that remains unwritten. The project that quietly dissolved into something else. The book with the bookmark at page 80, held open by a dried tea bag, the spine still uncracked past that point because you stopped reading the week your mother went into hospital and never quite went back.
I have a drawer. You probably have a drawer. Mine is in the bedside table, the one with the wonky leg I’ve been meaning to fix since 2019. It contains: three Moleskine notebooks with the first twelve pages filled and the rest blank. A book of short stories by Jon McGregor with a train ticket from Sheffield to Manchester marking page 87, which is as far as I got before something — I can’t remember what — intervened. A half-knitted scarf in a colour I can only describe as aggressive mustard, begun in January 2020 on a whim and abandoned when I realised I didn’t actually like knitting. A small watercolour set, still in its cellophane. A list of essay ideas written on the back of a Co-op receipt, none of which I’ve written. A Spanish phrasebook from a holiday in 2017, the CD still sealed.
These are not failures, though they feel like failures when I open the drawer and they look up at me with their patient, accusing faces. They are something else — something I don’t have a good word for. The material evidence of enthusiasm that outpaced follow-through, of curiosity that met the hard wall of sustained effort and decided to sit down. They are, in their way, as honest as Margaret’s crossword. They say: I tried this. I meant it at the time. I stopped. That is allowed.
But we don’t feel it’s allowed. We feel the weight of the unfinished, the gravitational pull of the half-started, the low hum of guilt that accompanies every abandoned project. We live in a culture that treats completion as a moral virtue and incompletion as a character defect, and we carry this belief so deeply that we feel it in our bodies — the tightening in the chest when we open the drawer, the urge to throw everything away and start fresh, to be the kind of person who finishes things. I have thrown away notebooks because the sight of their twelve filled pages and two hundred blank ones made me feel sick with my own inadequacy. I have done this more than once. And each time I’ve felt the loss — not of the notebook, which was cheap and half-used, but of the record of my own attempting. The evidence that I sat down on a Sunday afternoon and tried.
Margaret didn’t throw her crossword away. She folded it into a book. She kept it. And then, eventually, she let it go — or someone let it go for her, clearing a house, packing boxes, dropping bag after bag at the charity shop. The crossword survived because it was in the book, hidden between the pages like a pressed flower, and the book survived because someone thought it was worth fifty pence, and I bought it because I can’t walk past a secondhand bookshop without going in, which is a character trait I’ve stopped trying to fix.
What I’ve been thinking about, though, is the name. ‘Margaret’ written in the top corner, in the small rectangle the Telegraph provides. Why write your name on a crossword you might not finish? It’s not a legal document. It’s not a competition entry. Nobody is going to check. And yet she wrote it — a small, declarative act. This is mine. I am doing this. Even if I don’t finish it, it belongs to me.
There’s a specific anxiety I have around naming things that I’ve never quite articulated, and Margaret’s crossword has helped me see it. I have notebooks full of essays with no titles. Drafts saved on my laptop with filenames like ‘untitled_3_FINAL_final_v2.docx’ — the word ‘final’ doing a lot of heavy lifting for a document that is anything but. I have a folder on my desktop called ‘Ideas’ that contains forty-three documents, most of them less than a page long, and only six of them have titles. The rest begin with the first sentence, or with a note to myself that says something like ‘the thing about the man on the bus’ or ‘parkin again’ or simply ‘???’
A title feels like a commitment. A declaration that something is done enough to be named, the way you name a child or christen a ship. To title a thing is to say: this exists, it is what it is, it can be known. And I resist this because most of what I write is not done enough to be named. It’s still becoming, still uncertain of its own shape, still in the process of discovering what it’s actually about — which is rarely what I thought it was about when I started. I’ve begun essays about the Moor Market that ended up being about my grandfather. I’ve started pieces about queuing that turned out to be about loneliness. The title I’d have given at the beginning would have been wrong, and the thought of committing to a wrong title feels like a small lie I’d have to live with.
I should confess that during one particularly bad bout of title-dodging, late on a Tuesday when I should have been writing, I went looking for a shortcut. I found an Unsloppy AI Writing App — one of those online book title generators — and typed in a few words about what I thought the essay was about. It produced titles. Perfectly serviceable titles, some of them, with the sheen of something assembled from the average of a thousand other titles. None of them were wrong, exactly. But none of them were mine, either. The exercise was clarifying in its disappointment: I’d been hoping a machine could tell me what my essay was, and instead it confirmed that naming is the part you can’t outsource. I’d looked at the Reedsy generator too, on a previous evening, and come away with the same feeling — a list of plausible phrases, none of which I’d have written, none of which carried the specific weight of a title earned through the writing rather than applied to it. Fitzgerald went through a dozen titles before The Great Gatsby stuck, and ‘Gold-Hatted Gatsby’ was among them, which is a reminder that the distance between a working title and a final one is itself a kind of creative labour. You see what’s wrong, and the wrongness narrows the field.
What I’m really talking about, I think, is the fear of premature completion. Of naming something before it’s ready to be named, and in doing so, freezing it into a shape it wasn’t meant to hold. Margaret’s crossword has no title. It doesn’t need one. It is what it is — a Tuesday afternoon, abandoned partway through, signed by someone who meant to come back to it and didn’t. It is honest in a way that almost nothing in our culture encourages us to be. It doesn’t pretend to be more than it is. It doesn’t apologise for its blank squares. It sits there, in the book, between the war and the love story, and it says: I was here. I tried. I stopped. That is the whole of it.
That same discipline applies to title and framing decisions: before publishing, editors need a way to test a heading promises the same thing the article actually delivers, which is where how Unsloppy AI Writing App fits the writing workflow can function as a planning aid rather than a substitute for domain evidence.
I read something recently, while procrastinating on the very essay I’m now writing, about AI and the craft of writing — the Authors Guild’s guidelines on AI use for authors. What stuck with me wasn’t the policy framing but a single phrase about preserving the visible traces of thinking — the revised sentence, the crossed-out word, the margin note. I thought of Margaret’s crossed-out ‘ORACLE,’ the blank corners, the biro that skips. These are traces of a human mind working through something, getting stuck, changing direction, giving up. You can’t generate that. You can only live it and leave the evidence behind.
I think about Margaret sometimes, on rainy Tuesdays. I wonder if she finished the crossword later, in a different book, on a fresh printout. I wonder if she’s still alive, if she still does the quick crossword, if she still writes her name in the corner. I wonder about the Birdsong — whether she finished that too, or whether she stopped at page 201, at the darkest part of the trenches, and couldn’t go on. I wonder if the crossword was a break from the novel, a light thing to do when the heavy thing got too much, and whether she went back to the novel afterwards, or whether the crossword became the thing she did instead, the easier thing, the thing with clues that have answers, unlike the questions a book about war raises.
I’ll never know. That’s the point. Margaret is a name in a corner and a hand I’ll never shake and a Tuesday I didn’t live, and the crossword she left behind is the most complete portrait I have of a person I will never meet. It’s not much. Seven across and a crossed-out oracle and three blank corners and a name. But it’s honest, and it’s specific, and it doesn’t pretend to be finished.
I think that’s what I want from my own unfinished things — the notebooks, the half-essays, the aggressive mustard scarf. Not to finish them, necessarily. Not to complete them for the sake of completion. But to let them be what they are: records of trying, of a specific afternoon, of a hand that moved across a page and then stopped. To stop being ashamed of the blank pages that follow the filled ones. To write my name in the corner, even when I know I might not finish.
Margaret’s crossword is still in the book. The book is on the shelf, second from the left, between a collection of Edward Thomas poems and a battered copy of The Remains of the Day that I’ve read three times and will read again. Sometimes I take it down and open it at page 201 and look at the crossword, and I feel the same thing I felt in the shop — that quiet, unnamed recognition. Not that I know Margaret. But that I know the feeling of sitting with something, meaning to finish it, and not finishing it. I know the Tuesday afternoon. I know the tea going cold. I know the moment when you put the pen down and look up and the light has changed and you think: not today.
Most of a life is ‘not today.’ Most of what we start, we don’t finish. Most of what we mean to do sits in drawers and on shelves and in folders on desktops, quietly accruing the dust of good intentions. And maybe that’s not a failure. Maybe that’s just what it looks like to be a person who keeps trying, keeps starting, keeps putting their name in the corner even when they know the blank squares might stay blank. Maybe the most honest objects in our homes are the ones we never completed — the ones that still hold the shape of our reaching.
Margaret reached, on a Tuesday in 2016, and then she stopped, and the record of her reaching is folded into a book in my flat in Sheffield, and I think that might be enough. I think that might be what most of us leave behind, in the end: not the finished thing, but the evidence that we tried.