Welcome to the Dojo Wisdom for Writers Book Club! Every Wednesday, we meet to discuss one of the lessons in Dojo Wisdom for Writers. We’ll go in order, so it’s easy enough to follow along. Read the lesson, then read the blog post, then comment in the comments! Do feel free to comment on each other’s comments. I’ll answer questions as quickly as I can.
Lesson #23. A strike is strong than a push.
In this lesson, I talk about taking a fresh approach to your work, as a way to make it more attention-getting. But there’s also an aspect of this that’s about doing things quickly and therefore more effectively. I don’t want to take the analogy too far because sometimes the best work is the work that takes a long, slow slog to get done (a push that goes on and on). But sometimes the best work is the work you do quickly, without agonizing too long over what you’re saying or how you’re saying it. This is especially true if you’re prone to perfectionism and miss deadlines because your project isn’t quite perfect yet.
“For Jessica” was written like this, as quickly as I could get the words out in one stretch on a terrible night. Most people think it is my best work. That’s not to say I could have done it without the forty years of hard pushing work of learning to write that went before. It’s just to say that for this piece, doing it quickly was the only way I was going to do it at all.
There’s also an element of completion to do this. Get the work done.
Has there been a time when you did something quickly and learned that it was really good work?
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Dojo Wisdom for Writers, second edition, now available on Amazon in print and ebook! (Nook and other ebook versions here)
Catch a Falling Star (by Jessica Starre) and The Matchmaker Meets Her Match (by Jenny Jacobs), two of my favorite novels.
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