The Release: Creativity and Freedom After the Writing Is Done

The release is the stage when writers share the soul of their project—its gift. Here’s how to thrive and best serve your work once the writing is done.

In The Release, award-winning author and teacher Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew invites writers to lift their heads out of the product-oriented sandbox and find an alternative way to play. By returning writers to their original delight and guiding them in an ongoing creative practice, Andrew helps form habits of mind, heart, and body to support a project’s final flourishing, free from the burdens of seeking validation and measuring worth.

With the same skill and compassion she brought to her other resources for writers—Writing the Sacred Journey: The Art and Practice of Spiritual Memoir and Living Revision: A Writer's Craft as Spiritual Practice—Andrew writes with deep empathy for the emotional journey when a work is done, through celebration and grief, decisions around publication, the angst of receiving negative feedback or rejection, and the sometimes surprising challenges that come with success.

Anyone—amateurs and professionals alike, those who intend to publish and those who do not, those with book-length manuscripts and those with haiku written on paper scraps—can do this practice. This book is for anyone who wants to release their work with love.