I’ve been fiddling with the first paragraph of the current rough draft, and fiddling with it, and fiddling with it, and, and. Enough. Today I finally told myself to stop and — shocker! — I pushed through the next five hundred words. And started working on the next five hundred.
The maddening thing is this: I know I’m not trying to produce a final draft. I know it doesn’t do me any good to keep poking at the same four lines over and over again. I know I’m trying to loosen up and not write so dang seriously. And I still caught myself trying to produce perfection. If I knew all that, why is it so hard to remember?
Writing Every Day 