Don't Be Afraid To Change Your Premise

One of the lessons I learned in my martial arts classes was that "if you need to correct yourself in the middle of your technique, it's because you screwed up in the beginning." That has always been a very important lesson to me, but I've found it not readily accepted in writing.

The usual answer I get when I tell somebody that saying is, "that's what editing is for." And the biggest frustration for me was that they had a point. Nobody should be expected to write something perfectly on their first draft, no matter how experienced they are. In fact, writers usually give the advice to write a first draft just to get the story out, and then revise and edit your piece into quality (and I am one of those writers).

I finally understood this principle when I took some writing workshops. We would read somebody's story and then critique it. If we saw a plot hole or an illogical part in a story and we asked about it, authors would try very hard to justify these things. They jumped through a lot of hoops to try to prove that they didn't make a mistake. If the author simply accepted that it didn't make sense and just changed the premise of the story, it may require a rewrite, but it would be a much better story because of it.

And that's the real lesson for writers: don't be afraid to change your premise. Just because you've written something doesn't mean it's been carved into stone. And if you did carve it in stone, there's nothing stopping you from smashing that stone and chiseling into a fresh slab. Whatever you have to do to make a better story is worth it.