Writing is Rewriting Posted on April 14, 2008 David Elkind (bio) discusses ways of removing anxiety from the writing process.

People ask me how I write and so on, and my feeling is that writers are different in the sense that most people get anxious when they see a white page and get anxious about writing. And I know for myself, and I think many writers, I’m anxious if I’m not writing, so that’s the difference, I think. And that’s why I think those of us who write, write a lot, and those who struggle, struggle.

And so I think you have to face that issue if you’re so anxious about writing. And one of the things I did was teach myself to write. I would rewrite articles and rewrite paragraphs and so on, and it took some of the fear out of it.

Now I teach my students for example about, and my kids too, about dumb books. And books aren't, they aren’t all-knowing. All part of their — there are many dumb books. And there are many, not mine of course, but there are many books in which there are errors and that sort of thing. And so if you have a more critical attitude sometimes people implicitly have an idea that writing is about, "It has to be perfect, and you have to be, you can’t make mistakes," and so on, and I think that that’s inhibiting too.

We all make mistakes. And I think writing is rewriting, but certainly you’re never going to get it perfect. You’re never going get it all right. And I always say: Fluency precedes accuracy. Just get it down. Don’t worry about getting it accurate. Get it down, and just write it down. Whatever comes into your head, do it. Do it quickly and get it down on the paper, and then worry about correcting it later.

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