Advice from the Masters: Christine Jenkins

Sep 27, 2017 | Writing A Book

According to her web site, Christine Jenkins is “a writer and teacher who lives in Rhode Island with her husband and two teenage daughters.” Elsewhere on the site, you’ll learn that she is the author of Fake Smiles and Lasagna. Her LinkedIn post, “How Hard Can it be to Write a Book?” describes the three plus year project of writing and revising that resulted in the book.

Toward the end of the post, Christine describes how it was after three years of writing and revising and then doing it some more.

“Each time, I’d find something to change, giving me the sense I’d never really be finished. Until one day, I called it. The truth is, I knew it was done. I had a vision of what I wanted it to be before I started, and when that vision was achieved, it was finished. Sure, I could keep tweaking it forever on end if I wanted to. But then I would never move on to my next challenge – whatever that might be.”

I don’t know if that’s familiar to every author, but I know it resonates with me. You’re close to the end of the book and you keep finding things to improve until you do what Christine did: you call it and move on to your next challenge.

Want more? Check out the complete list of Advice from the Masters posts

If you want even more writing advice from writers, check out Jon Winokur’s blog, “AdvicetoWriters.”