Your writing projects are your babies. Sometimes you dream about them before conception; sometimes they emerge in a passionate rush. You raise them with care, patience, frustration, labor, and abiding joy. Like child-rearing, revision is long, arduous, and meaningful. Often it seems the kid will never grow up.
Then your baby is grown. The project is complete—more or less. It is of you but is decidedly not you because it has an essence, a unique identity. You’ve given it test-runs with readers, so you know it stands on its own. You love it dearly, but like any parent sending a teenager off to school or cutting a twenty-something loose from the purse strings, you show that love best by releasing it.
Comparing writing to child-rearing (which, as a mother, I’m qualified to do) has helped me see that the mistakes I’ve made launching work have sprung from one incorrect assumption: I thought creativity ended when the project was finished. But now I see three distinct stages in the creative process. In the first stage, we generate; in the second, we revise; in the third, we release. The release begins with the completion of a project and ends when the artist is no longer actively involved with that project, which might be in a year or two or never. Once your child is a full-fledged adult, your responsibilities decrease significantly while your love continues and, ideally, grows. The release is that period in which you parent your adult project.
Essentially our work during the release is to share the story’s essence, its life-force, with others. We can do this by obvious means, passing along the text. But that essence also resides inside of our bodies, so we can release our work subtly with our very being. Publishing, while it often augments a work’s influence, is not necessary for an effective release. And for those who do want or need to publish, the hidden dimensions of sharing that life-force, through our presence, relationships, and personal choices, are critical to releasing well.
Now when I finish a piece, I’m aware that two vessels carry the spark I so want to pass into the world: my words and myself. The release is the stage when we writers share the soul of our project—its gift.
Read more about The Release: Creativity and Freedom After the Writing Is Done and order here!