You Can Finish Your Manuscript: Lessons from Two Writers Who Did

What does it actually take to finish a manuscript? Not to start one — that part, many writers manage. But to keep going through the distractions and the self-doubt, to find your voice, to push through the middle, and to arrive at the point where you can say: it’s done.

Jo-Anne sat down with two writers who know exactly what that journey looks like. Rick Melvill is a creative director and scriptwriter who attended the Barrydale memoir workshop and went on to complete an illustrated memoir about his experience of being diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. Tim Chevallier is a filmmaker who has spent decades travelling the world and has now brought that life to the page in a memoir that spans continents and decades. Both attended the Barrydale Memoir Weekend. Both finished.

Here is what they shared.

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How They Began

Neither Rick nor Tim arrived at their manuscripts as experienced writers. Rick came from corporate scriptwriting — he describes himself as someone who never regarded himself as “a proper writer” — while Tim, whose background is entirely visual, worried that he was “more images” than words.

For both, the Barrydale memoir workshop was the catalyst. Tim describes arriving with the desire to write but feeling intimidated, and leaving with the momentum to begin. Rick found that the workshop gave him “things to hook onto” — and crucially, it forced him to start.

Rick’s motivation was also deeply personal. Diagnosed with stage 4 melanoma and told the prognosis was terminal, he found himself overwhelmed by information and decided to respond by writing — not a heavy, clinical account, but something light-hearted and illustrated, the kind of book he wished had existed when he was first diagnosed. That sense of mission carried him through.

Tim began chronologically, then a trusted friend suggested a different approach: start not at the beginning, but at the most dramatic chapter — leaving home at seventeen and a half to go alone to a different continent. That structural shift, Tim says, was the key to the whole book.

What Kept Them Going

Both writers were honest about the challenges of sustaining momentum when writing is not your livelihood and life has other demands.

Rick’s answer was the 5am club. He writes from five to seven in the morning, before the phone rings and the inbox fills. He aims for 700 words per session — rarely reaching a thousand — and, crucially, he doesn’t go back to edit what he wrote the day before. He just keeps moving forward. He describes sitting down at his desk in the early morning silence as “doing the most important thing I can do.”

Tim’s key to keeping going was accountability. When he stalled — and he did stall, repeatedly, over the four years it took to complete the manuscript — it was friends asking to read chapter by chapter who pulled him back. “Once I’d finished a chapter, ship it off, get some feedback,” he says. “They really helped me a lot.”

Rick also addressed a question he has heard many times at Barrydale workshops: “Who’s going to care?” His answer: he’s writing his memoir for his children. Every day’s urgent pressures, he points out, are not what your family will remember. The book is.

Finding Your Voice, Structure, and Material

Rick’s approach to structure is practical: bullet points. As a scriptwriter, he learned early that overwriting and losing focus are related problems, and that knowing your key points — your chapter headings — gives you somewhere to anchor. He keeps a list of subject bullet points and writes towards them, one at a time. “If I’ve got those chapter headings,” he says, “I find that so helpful — I don’t get lost, I don’t go too long.” An evocative chapter title, he adds, also keeps you interested in getting there.

Tim began chronologically, but on a friend’s advice restructured around a dramatic opening chapter. The lesson: it’s worth questioning your structure early, and being willing to change it. Notes kept over a lifetime also proved invaluable — for Tim, years of travel journals meant he could return to specific moments, places, and conversations with real detail.

Jo-Anne noted something worth underlining: your voice is already in your writing. When she read Rick’s manuscript, she could hear him in it — his personality, his way of speaking. Voice isn’t something you construct; it’s something you uncover by writing.

The Memoir Question: What’s True, What’s Yours, and What You Can Say

The Q&A produced some of the session’s most practically useful exchanges. On the question of accuracy in memoir — whether you have to be certain that dialogue and remembered detail are precisely correct — Jo-Anne was clear: a memoir is written in scenes, which means recreating dialogue and detail to the best of your memory and your truth. Quotation marks in memoir indicate that something is dialogue, not that it is a verbatim transcript. Readers know this. You are writing your version of events as faithfully as you can.

On fact-checking: historical facts you reference — dates, events — do need to be verified. Your memory of a conversation or a moment does not need to be verified in the same way, but the version you give should be honest.

On sensitive material and real names: both Rick and Tim had navigated this. Rick used a pseudonym for the oncologist he had negative experiences with, but named those he respects. Jo-Anne’s advice on worrying about causing offence: don’t let it sit on your shoulder while you’re writing. Write the story first. Then, and only then, decide what you are and aren’t prepared to publish.

On defamation: an attorney in the audience confirmed what Jo-Anne had always understood — a deceased person cannot be defamed, and their heirs cannot sue.

On Self-Publishing

Rick chose self-publishing from the outset, in large part because he had a strong visual sense of what the book should look like — full colour, illustrated, a coffee-table quality hardcover — and knew that a traditional publisher was unlikely to accommodate that. He worked with a designer who understood his vision.

His path took an unexpected turn. He was about to publish through a traditional publisher in London but ultimately decided to go with a two-track self-publishing approach: a print-on-demand version via Amazon for global reach, and a quality hardcover edition for the South African market. His lesson: Amazon is a distribution mechanism, not a marketing strategy. The promotional work is still yours to do.

The Barrydale Community: Writing Together

Perhaps the most touching thread running through the conversation was Rick and Tim’s description of what the Barrydale workshop meant to them — not just as a writing course, but as a community.

Rick described arriving in a room of strangers and leaving, a day and a half later, feeling deeply bonded with the group. The memoir process — writing exercises, sharing your work, receiving and giving feedback — creates an intimacy that surprises people. Jo-Anne agreed: participants regularly form friendships that last well beyond a workshop, retreat or course.

Tim put it simply: “If people can afford to go there and have time, it’s such a wonderful way to meet people — to learn about structure, to learn about the basics of writing memoirs and short stories. I got back ready to go.”

Their Top Tips

Rick’s: make a bullet-point plan of your chapter headings before you start writing in earnest. It gives you a destination for each session and stops you getting lost in tangents. “If you can see a chapter heading — an evocative little title — it keeps you interested. You look at that title and think: I really want to write this.”

Tim’s: find your accountability partners early. Send chapters to people you trust, ask them to hold you to it, and use their responses to fuel your next session. And go to Barrydale.

Both would add: start. Keep going. Finish.

From the Chat: Voices from the Room

The discussion in the chat reflected just how broadly these questions resonate. Lynn shared that she is writing a memoir to and with her late sister, who passed from cancer in 2022 — a project she has titled Dialogue with the Dead. Kirsten let everyone know that her own first book, begun at one of our workshops, took longer than she expected — but it got done, and she is now working on her third. Her message: muddle through, be persistent, and you can eventually finish it.

The question of writing through guilt came up too. Adrienne described feeling that writing — because it isn’t her day job — is somehow frivolous, a waste of time. It’s a feeling many writers recognise. The chat pushed back warmly: you are not being frivolous; you are feeding your soul.

A writer from the Netherlands pointed to something Gabeba Baderoon has said: that a writer has a responsibility to reveal certain things, even intimate or hidden things, even if family will remonstrate — if as a writer you judge those revelations to be relevant and important to a wider readership. It’s a perspective worth sitting with.

And Channon offered a practical note for those whose real-life material is making them nervous: using your own life story for fiction gives you room to add, change, and disguise — enough additions, and no one can say it is entirely autobiographical.

Want to go further?

Escape to the Karoo for a transformative writing experience

If you’re ready to take the next step, join us for our Memoir Writing Weekend at the Karoo Art Hotel in Barrydale (8–10 May) where Joanne Hichens and Jo-Anne will guide you through the skills and structure of memoir writing. For dedicated writing time with daily one-on-one sessions, stay on for the Barrydale Writing Retreat (10–15 May).

Find out more here, or download the brochure here.