Annie Dillard's Questions

What does it take to be an effective writer?
Courage [to recognize that] you must demolish your work and start over. You can save some of the sentences, like bricks. It will be a miracle if you can save some of the paragraphs, no matter how excellent in themselves or hard-won. You can waste a year worrying about it, or you can get it over with now. The part you must jettison is not only the best-written part; it is also, oddly, that part which was to have been the very point. It is the original passage, the passage on which the rest was to hang, and from which you yourself drew the courage to begin. [You must know what to] abandon as the work’s form hardens” (4-5).
Why is it so hard to delete the words I’ve written?
Several delusions weaken the writer’s resolve to throw away work. If he has read his pages too often, those pages will have a necessary quality, the ring of the inevitable, like poetry known by heart; they will perfectly answer their own familiar rhythms. He will retain them […] Sometimes the writer leaves his early [work] in place from gratitude; he cannot contemplate them or read them without feeling the blessed relief that exalted him when the words first appeared—relief that he was writing anything at all. That beginning served to get him where he was going, after all; surely the reader needs it, too, as groundwork. But no (6).
What do I do if I’m stuck?
Acknowledge, first, that you cannot do anything. Lay out the structure you already have, x-ray it for a hairline fracture, find it, and think about it for a week or a year; solve the insoluble problem. Or subject the next part, the part at which the worker balks, to harsh tests. It harbors an unexamined and wrong premise. Something completely necessary is false or fatal. Once you find it, and if you can accept the finding, of course it will mean starting again. This is why many experienced writers will urge young men and women to learn a useful trade (10).
Why should I save my revision for the end?
The reason not to perfect a work as it progresses is that, concomitantly, original work fashions a form the true shape of which it discovers only as it proceeds, so the early strokes are useless, however fine their sheen. Only when a paragraph’s role in the context of the whole work is clear can the envisioning writer direct its complexity of detail to strengthen the work’s end (16