the next project. Striving for perfection can stop you from achiev-
ing any results. Go for results.
The more you do, the better you get. Quantity leads to quality.
Ray Bradbury wrote 2,000 stories in order to get 200 that were clas-
sics. Some authors write six books in order to have two that are
worth publishing. Don’t judge your work as you write it, just write
it! Crank out the stuff!
Again, I am not urging you to crank out crap. I want you to
write spellbinding, unforgettable,Hypnotic Writing.
But too many writers spend too muchtime fiddling with their
work. In the next section I give you some eye-opening ways to edit
your work. Follow my suggestions, rewrite your work, and then let
it go. Don’t dwell on it!
Look! Your writing can’tbe perfect. Not ever!
Here’s why: If you’re writing something for an editor, that edi-
tor is going to change your work. He or she will alter words, sen-
tences, and passages; delete or add sections; change your title and
more. You can spend all year beating your head against your com-
puter screen, but no matter how much work you put into perfect-
ing your writing, your editor is gonna change it. Trust me. As H.G.
Wells said, “There’s no passion equal to the passion to alter some-
one’s draft.”
The strange thing is, your readers will neverknow what your ed-
itor changed! I remember sending a review to a major magazine. I
polished that thing till its perfection blinded me. But when the re-
view came out, the last two paragraphs—two entireparagraphs—
had been sliced off! I thought the review was a mess without those
last lines but no one ever noticed the change—except me. The
readers simply accepted the published review as is.
If you’re writing something for the public, say a sales letter or a
newsletter, you are going to have some people say your writing isn’t
clear. When I wrote a sales letter on myself as a ghostwriter, some
people wrote back with suggestions on how I could perfect it. One
person went through my letter and highlighted—in bright yel-
low—every time I used the words Ior my. He suggested “I” delete
those words! And when I wrote a newsletter for a client of mine,A Case against Perfectionccc_hypnotic_118-120_ch29.qxd 11/3/06 3:03 PM Page 119