Thoughts on the King of Hearts

“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way,” said the novelist E. L. Doctorow.

And there you have it. Feel free to substitute “painting a painting” or “designing costumes” or “composing a sonata” or any other creative endeavor for “writing a novel” — it’s all the same process. No one starts at the beginning, goes until they reach the end, and then stops.

No. One.

the citrine and its ingredients

Even if you go to dalelyles.com and search for cocktails — cocktails! — you will see that the process is not 1-2-3-end. Every cocktail I’ve ever invented started with a shinyperfect, followed by hesitant mixtures, tastings, sink-tossings, and adjustments.

The current top search result is a perfect example: Having created a tasty, tasty cocktail from some home-made ingredients I had been given, I had to circle back around to create a version I could make once those ingredients ran out.

That involved a re-balancing of the sweet and the vinegar sour, a process that definitely did not come straight from my brain to the cocktail shaker. I had to guess. I had to add, to subtract, until finally the new version tasted like the old one.

The point is that the King of Hearts Fallacy has never served anyone well. It is a snare and a delusion.

Instead, just do it. Fix it later. Make it betterer.

As long as you keep those headlights on — and as long as you keep driving! — you can make the trip.