Other people's words

Sometimes I think that I am doing this (and by this I mean writing) wrong; that I am too messy and chaotic and emotional and confused to be a 'proper' writer. And then I read other writers' words, and I realise that we are all as messy, chaotic, emotional and confused as each other. Here are some words that made me feel less like a five-year-old with finger paints today.

"I am also afflicted with perfectionism. Sometimes I feel like Perfectionism should have its own entry in the DSM - it feels like a diagnosable psychological disorder to me! I get so very stuck sometimes. I become aware that a sentence or chapter is not rolling along as well as ever it possibly could, and that awareness sort of rears up and blocks out everything else. I become distressed and distracted by the imperfections to the extent I have to sort them out before I move forward with the story. This is one way to write a book, and I think it will always be a part of my process; it’s who I am, and one thing I’ve learned in my struggles so far is you have to work with the brain you have -- and not waste time wishing you had a better one! But that doesn’t mean you let your hang-ups defeat you." - Laini Taylor (from Not For Robots, an invaluable guide to writing and one I re-read regularly.)

"It’s a bit like cleaning the house. You think, if I can clean up the living room then I’ll be happy. Then you clean up the living room and you think ‘Oh my God, doesn’t the kitchen look terrible now.’ So your next draft is to clean up the kitchen - and I suppose it’s when I can’t see any other rooms that need cleaning up, it’s ready." - Malcolm Knox

"... You’re doing all this stuff, you don’t know what you're doing, you don’t know how to do it, and suddenly you look at it and you see that there it is." - Ashley Hay

"I'm always drafting and redrafting as I go along. The first 'complete' draft is the one I'll send off. I write very disjointedly, very chaotically - and I'll have pieced together the whole from parts that have already gone through several drafts, and then excised other bits that don't fit." - Wendy James

And when the book is published I will feel like this:

"If I had my way I’d be sneaking around the bookshops with a pencil in hand, crossing out the sloppy bits, tightening things up." - Adrian Hyland

(The last three quotes are from this article).

P.S. I practised reading a section of the book aloud tonight - just to LOML - and I nearly threw up from nerves (not literally). It can only get better, right?