One of the things that is hardest for me about sitting down to write is that the act of putting something into words brings the number of possibilities down from infinite to finite. For me, the urge to erase everything–to crumple up the sheet of paper or press “delete” or open up a new document–is an incredibly powerful one. Once the words are on the page, they have a certain amount of power and it is very hard not to listen to them.
This can make rewriting a gruesome business, a process of arguing with voices that started out in my own head, but now have lives of their own.
This being so, what spoke to me most in this chapter was not the exhortation to the rough draft. Rather, it was the different ways of breaking something down and thinking about each piece. Here, it seems to me, is a way that I might be able to silence those pesky voices: take apart the different pieces and look at them separately. Without all the other parts backing them up, maybe they won’t be quite so distracting.
Besides, there is something quite appealing in the idea of confronting the voices in my head (or from my head as the case may be) armed with a pair of scissors.
