Writing is the easy part

I mean it. The easiest part of writing anything, a book, a poem, a short story, a recipe, is the actual writing. All you're doing when you write is regurgitating observations and life experiences. You're peeing on the wall. The hard part comes after. Editing is the hard part. Revising is the hard part.

After you spend hours, days, weeks, months, years, whatever, writing your first draft, you have to go back and fix the whole thing. You get that feeling of re-reading a book too soon.

There are books I read once a year. There are books I've read once, loved intensely, and will never read again. I've never read a book, gotten to "The End" and turned it over and started it again. That would be madness. That's the madness of the second draft.

Of course, some may go right back at it and some might let it sit in a drawer or on a hard drive before wading back into the mud.

I like to go right back. If I wait too long, I lose interest and I'm on to the next shiny object. You may want to wait a while, let it marinate.

I am also a fan of the Hemingway way. Hemingway method? Style? Whatever. Start the day by reading and changing what you did before. Not the day before, EVERYTHING you've already written. Once your book is too long to all the way back, you go back a chapter or two. By they time you finish your first draft, it's pretty damn clean.

So, remember. Writing is easy. Returning to your vomit... not so easy.

Keep writing,

Adolfo