'Writing is of you, but it's not YOU'

'I like David Foster Wallace's notion that writer's block is always a function of the writer having set a too-high bar for herself. You know: you type a line, it fails to meet the "masterpiece standard," you delete it in shame, type another line, delete it - soon the hours have flown by and you are a failure sitting in front of a blank screen. The antidote, for me, has been getting comfortable with my own revision process - seeing those bad first lines as just a starting place. If you know the path you'll take from bad to better to good, you don't get so dismayed by the initial mess.

So: writing is of you, but it's not YOU. There's this eternal struggle between two viewpoints: 1) good writing is divine and comes in one felt swoop, vs: 2) good writing evolves, through revision, and is not a process of sudden, inspired, irrevocable statement but of incremental/iterative exploration. I prefer and endorse the second viewpoint and actually find it really exciting, this notion that we find out what we think by trying (ineptly at first) to write it. And this happens via the repetitive application of our taste in thousands of accretive micro-decisions.'

George Saunders, the author of nine novels, including the Man Booker Prize winning Lincoln in the Bardo, and Liberation Day, a collection of stories.