Work until you’re proud.

How this simple editing tip has helped me finally fall in love with my writing

Katie E. Lawrence
3 min readFeb 27, 2024
Photo by Adil from Pexels

Trying to write a book with ADHD, when you don’t know you have ADHD, is kind of a wild experience. This was my life for six or so years after I came up with a novel idea when I was eleven and couldn’t put the idea down.

“I like writing things that will surprise me.” — Neil Gaiman

For years, I drew my plotline out, wrote chapters, shared them with friends, and kept telling this story that was bursting out from inside of me.

Just the other day, I found a correspondence between me and the friend who had been editing the book during my sophomore year of high school.

She was asking to do another pass before I self-published it, and I was telling her I was done.

I had been working on the project for so long, but was done working on it and wanted to release it into the world. It didn’t help that one of my goals for the year was to publish said book, and I wanted to get that taken care of while I was thinking about it.

In line with my impulsive tendencies, I published the book and let the masses (and by that, I mean my grandparents and maybe 20 other people) purchase it and read it, getting much positive feedback from all of the sweet old people in my life.

The only problem — was that there were *so* many things wrong with it.

Pages were missing, names of side characters that were inconsistent, pacing problems, things were out of order, and more. The story that was in my head hadn’t exactly made it out onto the page.

But surely it was fine because it had been so long, right?

Not exactly.

I mistook work, effort, and a lack of patience at the end of the process for the project being done. I had gone from a ridiculous perfectionist who was afraid to write for fear of getting it wrong, to an unchecked artist putting out half-baked work proudly into the world.

I’ve discovered, now, that it’s about having a happy medium.

We should avoid perfectionism and the paralyzing state that it, while still having standards and ensuring that we’re creating good work that’s been through all the checks and passes that it needs to.

I’m still writing that book.

I picked it up again and decided to start over, building it into what I always dreamed it could be. I’ve added more characters, more depth, and more experience, and am doing what an eleven-year-old me never could.

And I won’t stop until it’s done.

As artists, we don’t have to be perfect.

We can never please everyone, and sometimes rules have to be broken. But that doesn’t mean we can’t get to a place of being proud of what we’ve created. Sometimes we have to go back to the drawing board.

Sometimes we have to, as Neill Gaiman would say, kill our darlings, but it’s all in the name of one day being really, truly proud of what we’ve made and put out into the world.

Don’t stop until you get there. It’ll be so worth it. There’ll be hurdles to jump through, patience to rediscover, and battles to fight, but you’ll have something you can stand on at the end.

Best of luck, artists. You can do this. Don’t stop until you’re proud.

Kindly, Katie

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Katie E. Lawrence
Katie E. Lawrence

Written by Katie E. Lawrence

B.S. in Family Science, Research Assistant for the Alabama Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education, Family Life Educator, and amateur yapper. (:

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