Make It Exist First

New things are always ugly. That's what I'm learning to accept.

When I write code, I don't try to make it good on the first pass. I try to make it work. Clean, efficient, fast — that all comes later. The first job is just to get something running, however messy.

My writing works the same way. The first draft is always bad: typos, clumsy phrasing, the same word three times in a row. But a bad draft isn't a problem — it's material. I can come back to it, re-read it, and fix it one word at a time.

You can't improve an empty page.

So now I just make the thing first. If I don't like it later, I can always improve it. But if it never existed in the first place — how could I ever make it good?