Start Slow, Finish Fast

Start slow, and finish fast.

Start slow, because ideas are cheap. A dime a dozen. Too numerous to novelize them all. I know, I know. They all seem so promising at the beginning. You need to chew on them a little to know which have the potential to become great, and which are better buried in the yard behind the shed.

But finish fast, because ideas are fleeting. The muse is fickle, and if you don’t attend to her, well… she’s got better things to do than wait around for you. Waste no time between your first draft’s first word and its last. Every wasted hour is a chance for the project to lose your interest, to become yet another in the pile of corpses we authors all string up in the basement. Someday you’ll go back, you say. And maybe for the rare Lazarus, you will. But all the rest stay dead, no matter how much they haunt you.

Start slow, because you’ve got to be sure an idea will hold your interest until the end. And finish fast, because you’ll never really be sure. Start slow, because you can’t know the new idea is better than the one you’ve already got. And finish fast, because some ideas are too seductive to ignore.

Finish what you start, and only start what you’ll finish.