On Monday, I spent two hours sipping green tea and reading books at a nearby Borders. Among those books was Brendan Dawes’s Analog In, Digital Out. I was inspired and humbled by his creativity and open eyes.
He tossed out a phrase that struck me: “The craft of iteration.” That is, the repeated testing and reworking of an idea until it becomes a final product. He points out that this is (or should be) a craft, a careful process that we study and get better at.
Writing’s like that; the initial story idea is just the first 1%; the main work comes in reworking and refining that idea into a story. Same wih painting, and musical composition, and programming, and industrial machinery, and creating a dress.