It's scary to go by your gut when you hardly have experience writing and consider yourself a rookie and tend to look up to the masters and doubt your every decision and agonize, agonize, agonize. You really start to bloom when you stop agonizing, and you don't stop agonizing until you learn to trust your gut. And that is very hard. How can you trust it when there are all these other writers who know better? You think they know better because they've been writing longer than you, they wrote more books than you, better books than you, and so on. You can drive yourself crazy thinking these thoughts.
I'm certainly nowhere near trusting my gut fully yet, but it comes in waves and it happens more often. The latest test of that trust is happening right now in the shape of me hacking and slashing and cutting and ripping at the second draft of TUBE whilst making it into Draft 3, which is resulting in prose that is so lean and minimal and bony that it makes me scared, and yet somewhere in the darkest farthest corners of my gut I feel that what I'm doing is right.
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