A large part of the creative process is tolerating the gap between the glorious image you had in your mind, and the sad thing you’ve just made. Remember that everything great you see started out as someone else’s bad first draft. Version No. 20 of your work may still not be brilliant. But version No. 1 almost definitely won’t be. And if you think it is, look again. Whenever someone sends me a manuscript and says, “It just flowed out of me,” I usually think: Let it flow back into you for a while.
Pamela Druckerman, “How Creative People Can Find Their Place”, The New York Times (31 May 2015), SR4.