“It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.”

“Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.”

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

“The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.”

“All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this: Act as if it were impossible to fail. That is the talisman, the formula, the command of right-about-face which turns us from failure to success.”

In Friday’s Finding the Button post, Shiloh said:

So what I did…I made myself focus. (…) I cut my blog-hopping in half (sob).

Over the last several months, I’ve done the same thing. Part of it was necessity; I was working the day job and on deadline and I had no choice but to stay offline. But you know what I discovered while cutting back on the online involvement? I didn’t miss it. Yes, of course, I kept up with my friends, and remained on the few writing loops I participate in - yet even those I set to digest and would only read once a day.

Now that I’m writing at a much more comfortable pace, guess what? I still have those loops on digest, and I don’t visit but a half dozen blogs a day, and the ones I do visit are the ones where discussions are industry related, craft related, inspirational, etc. I rarely visit the sites I once lived for, where comment threads would run into the hundreds. Looking back, I recognize that I used those as distractions, thinking I needed to be on top of what was going on in the online world.

Guess what? I don’t. You don’t. What we need is the focus Shiloh mentioned, and that focus needs to be on our work, our health, our families, our writing, our editors and agents and publishers and what they want from us. We don’t have any need at all to keep up with gossip, or industry disasters. No, there’s nothing wrong with doing so, but look at the time you spend going out and seeking information on everyone else and what they’re doing, and then consider what you could accomplish spending that same time on YOU and YOUR writing. Trust me. You don’t need to know everything happening online. Not unless it has a direct impact on your writing career.

“Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer. Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance and a lack of harmony and proportion is more readily seen.” ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

The piece of paper on which I have this quote saved was printed out 11/25/98. It’s from an email, and it’s folded into a 2″ x 6″ rectangle, the whole sheet is. I love this quote because even though Da Vinci is referring to his work, I believe wholeheartedly that we can apply the same to what we do. Once we finish a project, if we have time to set it away for awhile, we’re able to come back to it with a different eye, one that will see the things we’re too close to see while creating - the forest for the trees concept. Obviously, if we’re knocking up against deadlines, this isn’t going to happen, but if we’re able to build in time for the manuscript to sit and ripen, we can then go back and submit it to that surer judgment before submitting it to an editor.

(Sweating challenger Bettie Sharp has created a multiple-project tracker in Excel that she is sharing for free with everyone. Click here.)

“Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.”

“The main rule of a writer is never to pity your manuscript. If you see something is no good, throw it away and begin again.”

“Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.”