It Is Finished (is it though?)

            Picture credit: JustWatch

Hi everyone. Thanks for reading. I hope you get to the end and finish my little thought for the day. I’d like to start with some thanks to my team. Thanks to my friend Lee for providing the spark of a thought that led to this piece. Thanks to the admin team at ACW without whom this blog would not exist. Thanks to Rosemary Johnson for encouraging me to start and explaining the logistics. Thanks to Susan Sanderson who faithfully posts links to the blog. Thanks to all the other MTW contributors. I think we make a great team.

Why am I talking about teams instead of getting on with my blog? For many writers, I imagine their favourite two words are ‘the end’, but for me that can seem like a long way off.  Back in the ’80s I liked a band called Petra. This was one of my favourites.

And the sky grew black as the night
(It is finished) And the people scattered in fright
The work had been done, redemption had been won
The war was over without a fight
It is finished

Lyrics from ‘It is finished’ Petra 1984

Regular readers of MTW may recall my intention to catch up with my old friend and colleague, Lee, mentioned above, who has published his first novel. We have since met and I returned home with my signed copy of ‘The Hiber Nation, Book One, Sleep.’ It was a great catch up and he’s now a member of ACW! We talked about the challenges of finding new purpose after our first careers and compared notes about writing as we strolled by the sea. Among other things, we discussed the challenges of getting a book finished, published and out there for people to make of it what they will. 

God is a finisher. He doesn't start what he does not intend to finish. I'm all too aware that starting to write a book is one thing, finishing is quite another. There can always be another redraft. Another typo search. Another season of pondering whether it’s the very best way of telling the story. Another edit. More tinkering. More thinking. Another round of feedback. One more typo search just to be sure. And so the wheel turns in perpetual motion. It's easy to justify staying on that wheel indefinitely even long after the last pesky typo is fixed. Not so long ago, writers had no choice but to cling to that wheel uphill and down dale as they pursued a publisher willing to take them on, but the option to self-publish has put a halt to that one now. It's not an easy option but for many of us, it could take us over the final hurdle...but the book still has to be finished!

If you’ve ever been on leadership training, you might have taken a profiling assessment such as Belbin to identify what you bring to a team. In broad terms, everyone has one or more of nine unique attributes that combine to make a great team. As a writer, do you feel you are a team of one, the Lone Ranger, fighting the good fight all by yourself but without all the skills? No one has all that's needed to make writing a success, so don’t beat yourself up if you’re struggling to finish what you've started. You may forget, but even our hero, the Lone Ranger, needed his faithful companion, Tonto, and Silver, his horse, to win the day. Almost every author I’ve met who is making progress relies on other people to get them across the line–formally or informally, they create a team around them. 

Look at https://www.belbin.com/about/belbin-team-roles. Which skills do you possess, and which ones do you need to bring in? Could asking for help accelerate you towards completion and save your project from languishing on the hard drive of doom forever?

I’d love to hear from writers about the teams you’ve created (even if you didn’t realise...) to become a finisher. Which bits do you need help with? What can’t you do by yourself?

Have a blessed day.

The End.