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| An interior illumination by Clive Hicks-Jenkins for my long-poem and epic adventure, Thaliad (Phoenicia Publishing) Amazon reviews: paperback Hardcover only here |
(And here you can find more Quora-fritterings by me.)
"What are some tips on staying motivated enough to finish writing a book?"
Marly Youmans, novelist and poet
Answered 2m ago
I’m feeling a bit allergic to the word tips: no tip can make you finish writing a book. Only whatever it takes for you can make you finish. And only you can answer the question of what it is that might be whatever it takes for you. That is, you will (or will not, as it turns out) make use of your own inner drive, passion for playing with words, impetus, dogged refusal to stop, anger, joy, or whatever it is that lives and burns in you and will take you to the close.
But I will say that I have known some wonderfully gifted people who began many books and stories and never could finish anything. This was a sadness to me, but they lived other lives, and perhaps it was not a sadness to them. They gave writing books a try and then moved on.
The grand thing about finishing is not having a completed manuscript; it is that you are somehow larger on the inside than you were at the start, and also that only bringing a thing to completion teaches you what you need to know in order to write that book. That sounds circular, and it is. In the realm of making books, much is mysterious.
