Writing Tip #15: Listen to Leonard Cohen's Advice

Spend a full day writing, painstakingly layering in word after word, only to discover that it all needs to go into the trash at the end of the day. The process is agonizing and depressing and…essential.

How do you keep doing it day after day? By accepting the fact that you have to write in order to write. (I'm still working on this.) The great songwriter Leonard Cohen, captured in a documentary by Lian Lunson, said it this way: “You have to write down what you have to abandon. You’ve got to see how it works with the whole thing and then throw it away.”