Day: May 12, 2008

“Perfection is not an attribute of humankind.”

As always, Neil Gaiman offers some simple writing advice that I should keep plastered to my forehead:

The second draft is where the fun is. In a first draft, you get to explode. The objective (at least for me) is to get it down on paper, somehow. Battle through the laziness and the not-enough-time and the this-is-rubbish and everything else, and just get it written. Whatever it takes. The second draft is where you go and gather together the fragments of the explosion and figure out what it is you did, and make it look like that was what you always meant to do.

And he goes on to say:

At some point in the revision process you will probably need to remind yourself that you could keep polishing it infinitely, that perfection is not an attribute of humankind, and really, shouldn’t you get on with the next thing now?

My chief problem as a writer, besides the laziness and the not-enough-time that I think nearly all writers — all people — share, has been my propensity to revise, and therefore stall out, as I go. I think if I could put blinders on, at least for that first draft, and not get so hung up over the perfect word or the perfectly crafted scene, I’d have a much better time of it and get a whole lot more written.