Repeat After Me: “I Am Not the Great American Novelist.” ‹ Literary Hub

In his faintly pompous way, Quiller-Couch-who, incidentally, is thought to have inspired the doggerel-composing Ratty from The Wind in the Willows-is admonishing writers to excise preciousness from their prose. But notice that he tells writers to go ahead and write those purplish perorations and then cut them. Embrace the bad, he seems to be saying. Wallow in your pretentions to greatness, then edit them out before the public sees them.

Great advice, but I'd argue it doesn't go far enough. Just as you have to cut the precious phrases from your early drafts to make a book come alive, you have to excise the preciousness from within yourself, that vision of yourself as a great and important author, before you can write freely in your own voice. To do that, you have to fail-and not just fail, but learn to incorporate failure into your process.