It's finally done. Now what?

I’ve just finished my biggest creative project to date, and I’m not sure what to do next. I know I should feel more of a sense of achievement, but instead I feel strange. Unmoored. Suspended between states. The thing I’ve been working on for months is gone and suddenly, I’m in the dark without a light to run towards.

It’s a hard feeling to explain. It’s a bit like when you complete that marathon after months of training, or put that last coat of paint on the walls of your new home. It’s as if Captain Ahab had finally caught his white whale. You pause and sigh. You’ve done the ‘thing’. You should relax. But then - there it is, that itch. What’s next? And where to start?

I’m writing to you from a café-slash-art-gallery in south London, where I have brought a pen and notebook and am staring at the blank page before me thinking: Fuck. Now what?

I’m just back from Edinburgh Fringe. I’m just back from Dublin Fringe, too, because I did both festivals back-to-back, starting my Edinburgh run on 30th July and ending my Dublin run on 14th September. I’ve reached the finish line of a comedy marathon, which technically started with a 45-minute work-in-progress show in August 2024, but actually started the day I walked into a stand-up beginner’s course in January 2019 and asked: how me be funny on-stage, please?

What a lot of people don’t realise is a comedian’s first Edinburgh hour is a product of years of work. Some of my earliest routines were baked into that show, including a joke about the Troubles written in 2019 which got me into the Telegraph’s ‘The funniest jokes of the Edinburgh Fringe 2025’. Nothing is wasted. But I can’t do those old jokes anymore. For the first time since I started stand-up, I have to make something from scratch.

And that’s scary. I’m in the void between ‘things’. My debut comedy hour, Train Man, was the first time I turned my writing into a ‘thing’*, so right now it feels hard to let go of. Over the years, I’ve performed hundreds of times at comedy clubs, but this was a proper show, damn it. It’s something I shaped and re-moulded. I wrote and re-wrote, and re-wrote again - and suddenly, I’m done.

Well, sort of. There will be more performances of Train Man. But, for the purposes of this Substack, I’m finished. Which means I have to make a new thing. My digital quill trembles aloft over the inkwell of inspiration! I am working off less than five hours’ sleep! But where do you begin when you finish one ‘thing’ and have to start again?

Today, I wrote this post, and by doing so, I’m making a small but ardent commitment to write to you every two weeks. Okay, this isn’t a side-splitting routine for my next comedy show, but it has got me scribbling again, and that’s something. Whether it’s starting a Substack post, scrolling for a new weekly planner online, or just sitting and thinking for five minutes about what you want to make next, congratulations. You’ve already begun again.

It’s okay if the last thing you made wasn’t perfect, or didn’t go exactly as planned. It’s fine to feel frustrated at times. God knows there are things I’d change or do differently for my first full hour at Edinburgh Fringe, and thinking about those things - the ‘could have’, ‘would have’, ‘should haves’s of it all - makes me want to mash my face into a wall. And that’s okay. Eventually you make peace with the things you can’t change or control. (If the wanting-to-mash-your-face-feeling doesn’t pass, remind yourself it’s expensive to pay for a nose job.)

Take stock of everything you’ve achieved and show yourself some appreciation. Because making anything in this world is fucking hard, and no-one will care more about what you’ve made than you, and that can feel lonely and small, especially if you are also your own worst critic. Pat yourself on the back for a change. Be your own number one supporter instead.

After twelve months of solid work towards my debut comedy hour, I have forgotten how to be human. Unfortunately, being human is where inspiration comes from. If you have just spent the past several months or years immersed in a project so deep it pulled you under and swept you away from family and friends and hobbies (mine include knitting and existential wallowing), start treading water and paddle back to them. Do you know why so many comedians have routines about airports? Their lives are BORING and only revolve around work / traveling to work. It’s long-established by now that no-one wants to hear about airplane food. If you want to make something good, take a break. Go run in a field! Pee in a stream!

As a break for my brain while writing my show, I have read almost exclusively books by Sarah J. Maas for the past year. Reading romantasy novels is the literary equivalent of bingeing hours of Married at First Sight. You know it’s bad, but it feels good. However, now that I am once again on the hunt for inspiration, I will need to take a break from these books and return to the classics for a while. I’m sure there’s an essay somewhere inside me about the so-called moral worth of reading classics versus junk and how I think that’s all bullshit blah-blah-blah. I don’t judge anyone for reading these books. I’ve read them: they’re fun! Aelin Galathynius has been my steadfast companion for many nights! But I think specifically if you’re a writer looking to improve your work, you have to push yourself to read the more challenging stuff, too. Go pick up a copy of Ulysses. Yes, I know it’s hard. That’s the point.

I’m not sure what I’m doing next. But that’s a temporary state. If you’re like me, down in the void, stuck between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’, it’ll pass. Remember: you’re the best you’ve ever been at whatever it is you do. I like to imagine Jane Austen sat down and thought, ‘Fuck. Now what?’, before writing her second novel, which happens to be Pride & Prejudice. If she can start again, so can you.

Good luck,
xoxo Caroline

*Train Man is my first stand-up ‘show’, but on re-reading, I should mention I have made ‘things’ before. Like this semi-scripted, semi-improvised podcast about the gangster-fantasy TV series Gun and Wand: The Official Companion Podcast, which you should listen to, because practically everyone in it is UK-comedy-famous now. (If being UK-comedy-famous means anything to you.)