I love Lawrence Block's quote: "If you're blocked, lower your sights." And the corollary, "It's only a book." I remind myself of these two points pretty much daily. It's just a book, not a cure for cancer. It doesn't have to be the greatest book ever written, it just has to get written. And when I start panicking over how wooden and mechanical and unreadable the writing is, I remind myself that I can fix it in revisions.
Lately I'm reminding myself that I was only hoping my last book would be a. finished and b. an accepted manuscript and it ended up for two awards. The suckitude of the process has no relationship to the quality of the product.
FWIW, I think this kind of mental torture happens in direct proportion to the amount the author cares. If we didn't care, we wouldn't despair of ever, ever, ever getting it semi-competent, let alone right.
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momijizukamori
no subject
Date: 2010-05-11 03:34 pm (UTC)Lately I'm reminding myself that I was only hoping my last book would be a. finished and b. an accepted manuscript and it ended up for two awards. The suckitude of the process has no relationship to the quality of the product.
FWIW, I think this kind of mental torture happens in direct proportion to the amount the author cares. If we didn't care, we wouldn't despair of ever, ever, ever getting it semi-competent, let alone right.