On Wednesdays, I share posts, fables, songs, poems, quotations, TEDx Talks, cartoons, and books that have inspired and motivated me on my writing journey. I hope these posts will give writers, artists, and other creatives a mid-week boost.
In a recent post on the Writer Unboxed blog, author Rachel Toalson shared the professional benefits of finishing what we start. Here’s an excerpt from that post:
Finishing our projects cultivates our professional skills and contributes to our mastery of the writing discipline. It’s an important part of putting in the work and gaining the expertise we need as writers. It gives us so many (so many!) opportunities to learn from our mistakes and make small shifts in the way we create and write.
That means the next time we sit down to write a book, we’ll do it better—because we have one, two, three, twenty-five under our belt.
We add to our overall body of work when we finish our projects. Who doesn’t desire a large body of work? A number of finished projects, in whatever stage they’re “finished” (even first drafts; we’ll count those), provides proof of our competence and dedication—we saw this many projects through to the end. How remarkable.
I have folders and folders of finished first drafts on my computer—all proving I’m working consistently at my craft and dedicated to building a volume of work. All reminding me, when I lose faith in myself, that I can do this, and I will again.
That’s the heart of it—we can do this, and we will again.
With all these benefits to finishing the projects we start, why do we still find ourselves struggling to write “The End”?
Gemma St. Claire grew up in upstate New York many moons ago. She achieved her Bachelor of Arts from the New York Institute of Technology, followed by her Master of Fine Arts from Lesley University. She married her very own, HEA husband and raised three beautiful humans before bouncing about the country. She has landed in Florida and is finally able to devote her life to her writing.
In 2014 my first (and only, to date) novel was published by Divertir Publishing. It’s out of print now, which is just as well. I rushed the ending and wasn’t all that thrilled with the beginning, but in the middle was some of my best writing (again, to date) so I took the advice of my new writer friend, Judy Penz Sheluk and I’m re-writing it. “Why not?” said Judy. “It’s your book.”
Joanne Guidoccio 