I don’t look back and edit stuff until I’m done with the first draft, because if I read it, I will get self-conscious about it and stop. Whenever I talk to people who are having trouble moving forward on a project, it seems like they’re spending too much time fixing details. Have you ever done any figure drawing? This is my analogy. When you’re starting work on a figure drawing that you’re going to spend, say, a week on, you sketch it in really loose first. You don’t draw the foot, and get the foot really detailed, and then the foot’s in the wrong place. You have to draw the whole thing really loose, and then you go over it again, and hone it, and it’s more about layers. You refine it with each draft, and you can fix problems, like, if you know you have to ramp up the scene in chapter two to make chapter five make more sense, you can do that later. But you’re going to psyche yourself out if you keep peeking. No peeking! Otherwise you just have this beautiful foot, and it doesn’t match the rest of the drawing, or you never even get to the rest of the drawing.

https://believermag.com/logger/an-interview-with-halle-butler/

https://www.thecut.com/2019/03/profile-halle-butler-author-of-the-new-me.html

(thnx np)