Get Distance from Your Work

It’s fairly common advice from seasoned writers: once you’ve completed a draft, get distance from your work.

For me, this has been the most valuable piece of advice.

Once you’ve sweated through a draft, it’s time to let it steep. It’s time to let it lie and not touch it for a while. The reason being that over the course of a draft, a writer becomes so immersed in their writing that they…
* …can lose objectivity in assessing their work.
* …have greater chance of overlooking the flaws in their work.
*…become stale in word usage and compromise the freshness of their work.

I know writers who fear putting distance between themselves and their draft, thinking not working on it continuously will make them lose their writing mojo, that it’ll be difficult to pick up the threads of writing again after an interval – here’s my advice for them:

Work on at least two pieces at a time. In my case, I usually shift between two poems. When I finish a draft of one, I set it aside and work on the second. Once that draft is done, I set that aside and go back to the first, going back and forth until I finally have revised versions. If one gets done sooner than the other, I just delve into my idea folder and start another one to replace it. It’s a good way of coming back to each draft with fresh eyes and the weaknesses are much more apparent after a break.

If you are working on a longer prose piece, have a smaller project – maybe an article going simultaneously, so you can shift focus to that when you need to get distance from the longer piece.

Working on two pieces of writing simultaneously is advantageous in that it provides a break from whichever piece you’re working on without having to break the daily habit of writing.

I hope this works for you. Until next week!