Confessions of a Rewrite-aholic

You can't have good writing without rewriting.  I think it was Hemingway who said that the first draft of anything is shit.  Writers must give themselves permission to write that first draft without stopping every couple of sentences to revise.  I must confess that I am as guilty of fixing my work as I go and I don't think that I'll ever completely kick the habit.  I finally completed my first novel, but many years were lost to the rewrite addiction and my story just didn't progress as it should have.  Writing is the only area of my life in which I'm a perfectionist.  My car looks like a mobile garage sale and I'm really terrible at laundry.  But with writing, I just couldn't allow myself to make mistakes.  It was only after I had a come to Jesus meeting with myself that I broke up with my habit.  That's not to say that I don't have relapses.  As with other addictions, relapse is part of recovery.