What a fantastic and thorough answer! I am of the school of thought that writing every day is a must. I don't always write part of the project I'm working on every day, but I do write posts, articles, and other things all the time. I like the idea of flexing my writing muscles as often as possible.
I occasionally look at the first draft of my just released book. Some of it I find absolutely dreadful (even though my partner, who read portions of the initial draft, thinks I'm too hard on myself), but it was a necessary stage in the book's evolution towards something polished and readable. There are some really pedantic passages that I simply removed, or even whole chapters that I scrapped and rewrote completely. I never stopped myself from writing the trash. I simply gave myself a mental standing order to return to those bad bits and make them better.
When I mention to people that I went from a draft of 100,000 words to a published book of 81,000 words, they wonder how I could delete so much. I explain to them that I gave myself a draft goal of X number of words, knowing that subsequent drafts would reduce the word count significantly. It was all part of the process of teasing out a good book from source material that was rather messy.
I occasionally look at the first draft of my just released book. Some of it I find absolutely dreadful (even though my partner, who read portions of the initial draft, thinks I'm too hard on myself), but it was a necessary stage in the book's evolution towards something polished and readable. There are some really pedantic passages that I simply removed, or even whole chapters that I scrapped and rewrote completely. I never stopped myself from writing the trash. I simply gave myself a mental standing order to return to those bad bits and make them better.
When I mention to people that I went from a draft of 100,000 words to a published book of 81,000 words, they wonder how I could delete so much. I explain to them that I gave myself a draft goal of X number of words, knowing that subsequent drafts would reduce the word count significantly. It was all part of the process of teasing out a good book from source material that was rather messy.