When it comes to early drafts, this is often the only editorial guidance I need.

Revision requires you to have faith in your own ability to improve your work. ​ Try something else. What if you give yourself that reward immediately, as a way to coddle your writer brain and help it along? If I let myself go sit outside with a seltzer and a book for 20 minutes (so decadent), it helps me feel like a functioning, healthy person who can sit down and read her terrible draft. ​ If I can forgive myself for being imperfect,

(He’s off to chill in the woods and freelance.) ​ What you really want in an editor is someone who’s still on the dock, who can say, Hi, I’m looking at your ship, and it’s missing a bow, the front mast is crooked, and it looks to me as if your propellers are going to have to be fixed.

Yes! I recommend this for proofreading all the time. https://t.co/vW1z5xNv46— Sid Orlando (@ohreallysid) November 14, 2018

Paul Graham

I’m proofing the third pass of Keep Going. I find it really difficult at this stage of a project to get the right perspective — “fresh eyes” — for the thing, which makes it really, really hard to make edits. The production schedule for this book has been much more accelerated than any of my

Over on Twitter, I saw this insightful observation: She is not wrong. There’s a lot of writing advice that focuses on, “shut off the inner critic, just write, you can fix it in editing&…

To leave something important to you unrefined — uniterated, firstdrafted — is the laziest safety net you can deploy.