I’ll admit it. I haven’t touched my manuscript in months. All my New Year’s resolutions quickly fell by the wayside as I kept telling myself that I would start working on it again when I got back to school. Then when I got better after being sick. Then when I was finally in one place again for a while.
All of these were lies. And the longer I went without even opening the document on my laptop or putting pen to paper, the worse I felt about the project – and the more I wanted to avoid it.
This is why, on my trip to Boulder, I picked up Finishing School: The Happy Ending to That Writing Project You Can’t Seem to Get Done. A joint effort by Cary Tennis, creator of the Finishing School method, and Danelle Morton, one of his students, this book first tackles what Cary and Danelle call the Six Emotional Pitfalls. (Spoiler: I was stuck in the shame pitfall.) Then it describes Tennis’s method: basically, instead of reading each other’s writing and giving feedback, Finishing School focuses solely on the performance of work, any work, that moves the writer forward. The group meets and discusses that week’s successes and failures, but the members are simply sharing whether or not they adhered to their (realistic, planned) schedule.
Tennis and Morton delve deeper into why Finishing School works, detailing the emotional responses people tend to have when they shift their focus from some huge project to the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other approach. As someone who tends to get caught up in the planning phases, I appreciate that Finishing School does emphasize the act of Doing the Work. You’re allowed to come up with a schedule, you can even color code it if you want, but then you must Do the Work when the appointed time comes. (There’s even a chapter dedicated to “My Fake Schedule,” a phenomenon I’m all too familiar with.)
This is one of those writing guides that may not fit everyone, depending on where they’re at in the writing process, but for me, it was exactly what I needed at this point.
5/5 stars on Goodreads
The Grammar Changeling 