Finishing School by Cary Tennis

Author:Cary Tennis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-11-16T17:22:41+00:00

Part 2

How It Works

Danelle’s Two Months in Finishing School

Danelle

THE FIRST TIME I got paid to write, I was a beat reporter. Newspaper editors were more impressed by an accurate story turned in on time than they were by a nicely turned phrase or a well-chosen word. I liked the challenge and the practical attitude that whatever I turned in was as good as I could make it in the time I had. For this reason, I am a writer who does not fear deadlines. I usually don’t have trouble finishing things. This has made me something of a pariah to writer friends who labor over a single sentence for hours.

Little did I know that my slightly condescending sympathy for their struggle would be revealed as hypocrisy when I failed to finish a project of my own.

I’ve collaborated on fifteen books, three of them best sellers, and written dozens of proposals for books that have sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yet when it came to a project of strong personal meaning to me, I lost that swift certainty. I spent two years writing, and not writing, a book proposal.

A friend who knew how I was struggling offered me an empty apartment in a building he owns in Nyack, New York, for two weeks. I took a plane, trains, and finally a very long bus ride to Nyack, imagining that if I could get away from my place in San Francisco, suddenly all would be clear and obvious. I’m not sure why I was convinced that separating myself from my normal life would visit upon me the heavenly angels of clarity and focus, but I was willing to spend money to invoke those angels. Still, this radical transplantation did not work, and neither did I. Every day in Nyack was agony. I wrote very little and I spent a lot of money on white wine.

In the year after my Nyack disaster, I rented cabins in the woods for weekends, where I tried to pep-talk my way into productivity. As I drove to my mountain retreat, the speech was always the same: “This time you’re just going to sit your ass down in the chair and bang it out. You’ve done it before. You’ve written a book proposal in a weekend. All you have to do is stop fucking around and write.” This pep talk was more like shame talk that placed me in a state of mania. I couldn’t write, but I wouldn’t let myself leave the cabin and take in the beautiful world around me, because that was a treat reserved for the moment when I finished banging it out—goddamn it.

After two years of false starts, every time I thought about this idea I had loved, I felt terrible. At low moments like those, I was certain I’d never write a book under my own name because I was just too much of a loser. Then I saw Cary’s advertisement for Finishing School.

Maybe what I needed was support, something I usually avoid.

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