In a post on Lit Hub, Michael Bourne says it’s not enough to murder your darlings on the page; you have to kill the darling within.
“Just as you have to cut the precious phrases from your early drafts to make a book come alive, you have to excise the preciousness from within yourself, that vision of yourself as a great and important author, before you can write freely in your own voice,” Bourne says. “To do that, you have to fail—and not just fail, but learn to incorporate failure into your process.”
Every writer writes crap, but we edit and rewrite and learn from our mistakes. Then we make different mistakes. “This requires, first, that you see your work clearly and honestly and cultivate a trusted circle of writers and editors who will catch what you miss,” Bourne writes. “Then you have to listen to what they’re saying and not only fix the problems but understand them so you don’t go on endlessly repeating them. And finally, you have to remain patient because you’ll fail again in new and different ways. It’s the only way you’ll ever succeed.”
