Don't overcook your writing.

I know I'm a good writer, but I'm often unsure if my work-in-progress is any good or not. As a result, I have a neurotic habit of over polishing my prose, and worse, am addicted to impulsively re-working one draft too many. That's why I sometimes tend to overcook my writing, which means I'm then left with a sterile piece of work. I've learned to keep all my old versions on my computer's hard drive (and my external hard drive too), so if I overdose on my revising, I can always locate my first effort, which usually turns out to be the most scintillating one of the lot.

I'm sure there was a time when I didn't habitually anguish over my prose, but I'm unable to regress that far back. Over the years, I've found it harder to write unselfconsciously and really have to labour over my craft. It can be magical banging out a new project, but I discovered long ago that writing is all about constant re-writing.

I envy newbies' fluid stream of confident, subconsciousnes spew, but unless they are self-critical enough to edit their work, it often comes out as a messy, self-indulgent sprawl with enough typos and repeated adjectives in the same sentence to make any seasoned writer feel more secure.

Write on, I say, but there must surely be a happy balance between a stream of consciousness delivery and an over-slick attention to editing detail.

( I re-wrote this post too. Does it show?!). 

Copyright: Frances Lynn 2006