Write or Die I, II, and III. A Year to Finish.

2015 was the year of co-writing a movie—Phantom Halo which won Best Screenplay at the New York International Film Festival that same year. 2016 was the year writing a book—You Don’t Look Adopted which won Best of Bella Online that year. 2017 was the year of pounding out an onslaught of blog posts—Anne Heffron.com. That site has won nothing, but I don’t care because writing those posts are like eating potato chips. I don’t think you could pay me to stop.

2018 is the year of writing and community. I want to see how many people I can help get a book or something written finished so they can have the same relief I have of I did it! I wrote a book, a screenplay, a poem, a speech, a long-due break-up letter! I did it!

I want you to write yours. Your thing. Whatever that thing is so that when you are on your deathbed you won’t have to say, Damn it. I never did write that so and so….You will have done it, and so you can get busy eating as much cake as possible before you leap off this sweet mortal coil.

There are so many things I can’t do. I can’t read a map. I can’t speak Italian. I can’t understand why people are cruel to each other, but what I can do is help people find and tell their stories. I do it all the time. I’m like those dogs that sniff for drugs, only I do it for writing projects. Are you a poet? A word muralist? A fiction writer? A memoirist? I can hear your body telling my body what it needs to write. Just don’t ask me for directions to the local 7-11.

I lead Write or Die classes that in three hours clear out the blocks that had stopped me from writing for over 30 years. I am not special. What stopped me for so many years stops so, so many other people. How do I know this? I taught college-level writing for over 15 years, and ever since I was a child I listened to all the reasons my mother could not write her story. I watched her die before her first book was finished. I saw her buried before she saw her book favorably reviewed on the cover of The New York Times Book Review and in the pages of her beloved New Yorker. I did not want this to happen to me—to miss the party of having finished something (that was not my life)—and so, in 93 days, I wrote my book and got it over with. I did it. Now people write to me almost daily to tell me my book has changed their life in some way. That is just icing on the finished cake, but boy is it sweet.

It was worth the sacrifice, worth the deep debt I sunk into when I took three months off any kind of paid work and went to live in the apartment of a famous writer to finally do what I’d been saying I wanted to do all of my adult life: write a book.

I found my voice, wrote my book, and I now can move on to help as many people as possible do the same thing so they can have the same feeling of completion, the same feeling of satisfaction.

It’s not about getting it perfect, I found. It’s about getting it done. I had never said I wanted to write something perfect, and yet it was the perfection that I tripped over all those years I was unable to produce anything of any heft. I am here to help you get your project done in whatever form that takes. Let’s get started on this.

The three things I had that helped me to finally write my book were accountability (I told all my friends I was leaving home and not coming back until I had finished a book), financial investment (I went into debt to finance the three months—sort of like college), and community (It’s important to have people cheering you on to finish. Just as runners in a marathon have cheering fans, you are more likely to cross the finish line, I believe, if you do, too.)

I want everyone who wants to do this to be able to swing it financially—so I made three plans.

As far as time goes, if you write half a page every day, at the end of the year you will have a book. We’ll work on getting you writing quickly so that you get your project done. Again, it’s not about perfection: it’s about finishing. You can go to other places for perfect. Here you’re getting finished.

Plan I

*$300 payable via Paypal (anneheffron@gmail.com) or Venmo.

* you commit to finish some kind of writing project at the year’s end.

* ½ hour private phone call each month

* you become part of a closed Facebook group where you have a community of other writers in this plan who are now your people.

*I will post teaching videos at least two times a month addressing any problems writers in the group are having.

*Maximum group size of 20 people.

*you can join at any time with the understanding that everything must be finished December 31, 2018.

Plan II

*$600 payable via Paypal (anneheffron@gmail.com) or Venmo.

* You commit to finish some kind of writing project at the year’s end.

* 1 hour private monthly phone call.

* You become part of a closed Facebook group where you have a community of other writers in this plan who are now your people.

*I will post teaching videos at least two times a month addressing any problems writers in the group are having.

*Maximum group size of 20 people.

*You can join at any time with the understanding that everything must be finished December 31, 2018.

Plan III

*$100 payable via Paypal (anneheffron@gmail.com) or Venmo.

* ½ hour phone call to help get you started.

* You commit to finish some kind of writing project at the year’s end.

* You become part of a closed Facebook group where you have a community of other writers in this plan who are now your people.

*I will post teaching videos at least two times a month addressing any problems writers in the group are having.

*You can join at any time with the understanding that everything must be finished December 31, 2018.

All three plans are in the same group. The difference in price reflects the time you spend with me on the phone. Any time you want extra one-on-one time, we can arrange that. Phone or Skype sessions are  $125 an hour. 

Just think. A year from now the world could contain your work, your book, your song. A year from now you could dust off your hands and say, “If I can do that, what can’t I do?” And you can move forward and move mountains, or just sit down, put your feet up, and take a break to watch the birds fly past knowing that you just rocked it.  

It would be amazing if we had a party/reading somewhere in the United States at the end of the year. I would get to cry publically for the entire time, and so I will work on the ending event as we are getting started. Can you imagine? A room full of writers celebrating both their and your accomplishments? That place would get loud fast. So many words flying around. So much meaning. So much love.