Frank Chimero did a wonderful “Ask Me Anything” session on Designer News earlier this week. I loved this bit about the window of approval on your own work:
Writing and publishing a book is hard. Here‘s the tough part: you have a window of approval on your own work. For me, I typically only like the last 2000 words I‘ve written. This is hard if you‘re writing a 30,000 word book—you‘re constantly tempted to go back and “fix“ the previous mistakes to improve it. Doing the work makes you better, but also makes you dissatisfied with the work you‘ve already done. I suppose any big project is like that.
We all know what he says is true but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it described so well. On every project I’ve worked on for more than a month or two I see this same phenomena… the temptation to go back and fix things.
Writing a book must be incredibly challenging from this perspective.