I had an epiphany the other day. It seems that every time I sit down to write something, I freeze in front of my computer, hands poised on the keys. I stare at the screen, searching for just the right words, just the right tone. Beginnings of sentences play though my head, and all those great language ideas I had while lying in bed or standing in the shower or driving to work seem to vanish. Vanish, actually, is the wrong word. They’re still there, but they hide like playful children. I can hear them giggling, and I know they’re there, but I cannot see them.

So the proverbial light bulb that came on over my head was that the words don’t have to be perfect when I first write them down. One of the beauties of writing is that unlike, say, brain surgery, you can go back over what you’ve done to get it right. In other words, your first swipe at it can be just a draft, a sketch with language. After getting the whole thought down, you then can start at the beginning, reshaping the words, filling the gaps.

Imagine if Leonardo da Vinci (also known in our house as Leonardo da Fishy thanks to The Muppet Show), working from the upper left hand corner, decided each brush stroke should be perfect and that he should not have to go back over any section he’s worked on. After a couple of hours, the Mona Lisa may have looked something like this:

In case you don’t recognize it, that’s the upper left corner of the Mona Lisa. Of course, he wouldn’t have painted the cracks and lines–those come with age. But you get the idea: the rest of the canvas would have been blank.

No, I’m guessing that da Vinci started by sketching a big oval for the face, then sketched in the eyes and lips, drew in the crossed hands, etc. In other words, rather than trying to create perfection from the very first brush stroke, he began with a draft and slowly refined it until it was perfect. As I hear tell, this da Vinci guy was pretty smart. Maybe he was on to something there.

Writing should be the same. Rather than attempting perfection from the first key stroke, writers (writers of any kind) should get the concepts down quickly and then go back over the words to refine the language. (In my case, this means stepping away from it for a while and returning later. Also, I tend to edit by reading out loud to see how the words sound.) When done this way, writing goes much faster.

I’m certain this is not news to some of you. I’m a perfectionist, however, and the concept of throwing words at the page and then going back to rearrange them simply had not dawned on me.