Avi

word craft

blog

You’ve finished … and then?

© Marekuliasz | Dreamstime.com

Gillian writes: “You’ve said [of writ­ing] ‘It’s nev­er done.’ I’m stuck in the per­fec­tion­ism sand trap. I’ve rewrit­ten count­less times. Friends and fam­i­ly urge me to send it off. That’s a par­a­lyz­ing thought. Any advice?”

The eas­i­est part of writ­ing is when you are done with a project. I recall my friend Natal­ie Bab­bitt say­ing to me, “That’s when it gets easy. You are just adjust­ing com­mas, but you can pre­tend you are writing.”

On the oth­er hand, start­ing a new project is often daunt­ing. (You said par­a­lyz­ing) You know what’s ahead of you and it is not easy.

That said, writ­ing any­thing is always a learn­ing process. Still, you don’t get to use that learn­ing until you start some­thing new. Even when you write some­thing that won’t be pub­lished you have learned some­thing about writ­ing and yourself.

Then again, an edi­tor once said to me (in a rejec­tion let­ter) “Lots of peo­ple have one book inside of them. It’s the sec­ond book that tells us if there is a real writer at work.”

Final­ly, to be bru­tal­ly hon­est, the world does not care if any of us write anoth­er word. There is plen­ty of good writ­ing avail­able already. Ulti­mate­ly, all that mat­ters is if you want to write.

Do you?

Pho­to: © Mareku­liasz | Dreamstime.com

1 thought on “You’ve finished … and then?”

  1. Dear Avi,
    The world may not care if any of us writes anoth­er word, but there is at least one per­son out there in the world who will.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.