on Jane Friedman site:

I was staring at my draft the other day, contemplating a scene I loved but that didn’t quite fit the storyline. As I debated whether to fix it or ignore it, a post from my knitting friend Dee popped up in my feed. “I screwed the pattern up,” she’d written in the caption under the photo of a partially finished pink scarf, “and I don’t know how to fix it without making it worse. Do I ignore it and hope it doesn’t show too much?” Suddenly, the connection between knitting and writing couldn’t have been clearer.

Writers and knitters have more in common than you might expect, because creative work, whether in words or in wool, rarely happens in a straight line from beginning to end. Creative work loops back on itself, gets all tangled up, and sometimes requires you to undo hours of effort before you can move forward again. Accepting this truth has been one of the hardest lessons for me as both a writer and a knitter, but also the most valuable.

Whether knitting or writing, new projects always start in the same exciting rush of possibility. I open a fresh Scrivener file, full of a story idea, certain that this will be the one to get me a literary agent and a publishing deal. My friend Dee falls in love with a scarf pattern, buys the yarn and casts on, visualizing the way she’ll look draped in perfectly knitted pink mohair.

We both get to work. Everything is flowing along smoothly until suddenly it isn’t.

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