Seven Sensible Steps to Success As an Author
Step 6 (continued). The wonderful wells…

A work in progress never leaves you, of course; but taking a little holiday from the desk does allow the waters to flow again into the wonderful wells of the human imagination.

It never ceases to astonish me that, just when I think I must have exhausted every idea and image in my brain, I’ll return to the source after a little while and find it brimming again with new words and possibilities.

It’s the font of all our dreams … and while life persists will always replenish itself.

So that when you return to your book, it is as one refreshed in mind and spirit. You look at the pages with new eyes, and the approach is far more objective than it was in the white-hot heat of inspiration.

Like a good sub-editor, you come to the second draft ready to wield the blue pencil in a reasonably critical but detached frame of mind: hoping to do what is best for the book, if not necessarily for the ego of the author who produced it.

Though that, too, will generally come in time.

Next: Step 7: Learning to love your editor

Photo: Woodland Stream by Ali Masumi, Wikimedia Commons.