A finished book is beautiful. It’s professionally designed, well organized, and creates the impression the author totally has their shit together.
Don’t judge a book by its cover. The book was most likely a mess until the last moment.
There were loose notes everywhere in the beginning, on scrap paper, voice memos, legal pads, and napkins. No one was even sure this concept would work.
A rough outline was written and then trashed, rewritten, reorganized, rethought, and rearranged.
More random, disjointed notes piled up—post-its were slapped on the computer screen, bathroom mirror, fridge, and car dashboard. Great ideas were thought up and then forgotten.
Hair was torn out sitting at the computer. Nothing came out. Then, when words finally started appearing, they were terrible—embarrassing, unusable rough-draft garbage. Entire sections were thrown away. Beta readers looked at it and said, “Huh?”
But there was a glimmer of something in there. So it got tweaked, retooled. Some of the writing got better.
Copy was edited, typos and misspellings fixed. And then, just before final delivery, a whole chapter was cut and rewritten from scratch, based on a fevered last-minute thought.
Editors, writers, and sales teams argued about cutting a part here, adding a part there.
This is how good writing happens. It bubbles up from muck and slime in a prehistoric swamp. It starts to swim. Then it learns to walk. With luck, it evolves to walk on land and possibly fly to the moon.
Projects without promise go extinct all the time, ideally in the initial concept phase. The rest endure a “survival of the fittest” challenge to make it all the way to the printed page.
Learn to spot the winners by noticing which ones have legs.
p.s. If you need help spotting the winners, I got you. I’ll look over your ideas and we’ll figure it out together. Today is the last day to enter to win a half-hour one-on-one coaching session with me. Just hit the subscribe button and pick the Annual plan (30%) chance to win, or Founding Member (100% chance to win). Sign up today!
This is spot on! I am now on my third revision of my novel and I have had to "kill" some of my babies!
Good analogy at the end of this mini essay. (rising from swamp ... fly to moon)