On not revising (at least for now)

On the evening of January 31, 2019, I sat in a third floor classroom of Loft Literary in Minneapolis and stared at the blank pages of the teal-covered Moleskin I had just purchased. It was night one of the year-long “Novel Writing Project” class. There were a dozen of us there, and each of us had parted with a lot of money to spend Thursday nights together with our mentor, Peter Geye. We were all going to write a full novel that year, by gosh and by golly. And this was the start.

Write the du...