P.S. How to Finish a Creative Project: A.A. Milne's Notes

"I like writing, by which I mean that I like putting down certain words in a certain order.”

I’ve been thinking lately about the very end of creative projects—not the beginning when ideas feel abundant, or the muddled-middle when drafts feel uncertain, but the final stretch—when the work is nearly done but hasn’t quite cohered. What kinds of notes help creative people finish what they’ve begun?

With this in mind, I was excited to visit the New York Public Library to see their newly acquired collection of A.A. Milne’s (1882-1956) proofs and maquettes (book mock-ups) for Now We Are Six and House at Pooh Corner.¹ These papers, I suspected, would be instructive in thinking through how Milne finished his projects.

So much of the end of a written project involves increasingly small, precise decisions: In Milne’s case that included copy-editing and page layout. Today, authors receive digital “proofs”—a preliminary, PDF version of a book—to mark up. But Milne worked in a pre-digital era.

Moreover, his partnership with the illustrator E.H. Shepard was unusually close in the way that their words and illustrations intertwined. In fact, Milne insisted Shepard receive a share of the royalties rather than a flat sum—a clear sign that Milne valued the depth of their collaboration.

As I hoped, Milne’s proofs and mock-ups are wonderfully material—bulky things, filled with cuttings and paste-ins, loose slips of paper, and Milne’s own hand-written corrections. They also offer a unique insight into the end-stages of his creative process.

So, let’s explore Milne’s notes at the end of his process—the notes he took just before his Winnie-the-Pooh books hit the shelves.

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