Writers as a group have refined the art of self-flagellation … and not only evaluating their own prose or verse when writing a book. “I didn’t do any writing,” my writing coach clients will say to me. Granted sometimes that means they didn’t even think about their projects, much less look at them. But more often they go on to tell me about the research they’ve done or how they’ve been trying to figure out the answer to a problem.
“That counts,” I say again and again. “Writing a book doesn’t just happen automatically.” As a writer, you need to know what you want to say and how you want to say it. Often you need facts to work with, whether you’re dredging them up from a book, the Internet or the back of a cloudy bank of memories.
Still writers persist in thinking that unless they’ve written words on a page or on a screen—and perfect ones at that—they’re not writing. That would be like a potter saying that kneading the clay before putting it on the wheel isn’t part of making ceramics, or that ordering the wood you need to frame a house isn’t part of building.
It’s easy to see how nutty the concept is when you look at other people’s professions. So quit beating yourself up for laying the foundation for your writing. And here’s an idea … quit beating yourself up period.
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