It has occurred to me that my current knitting project is the perfect metaphor for my current writing project.

I’m knitting a big circular shawl from a book of Victorian lace patterns. Oddly, I started it because I had some yarn left over from another project, this pattern has always intrigued me, and at the time I started it, I had a vague idea for how I was going to use it (as a throw rather than as a shawl). But it was troublesome from the beginning. It’s knitted in the round as a big circle, starting with four double-pointed needles, casting on with three stitches per needle on three needles, and one needle for working. It grows from there until you can switch to a circular needle. There were a few false starts because trying to keep it all together without twisting when there are so few stitches is a challenge, but I finally got it going. I’d been working on it for a couple of months before I noticed that there was a problem way back, probably while I was still on the double-pointed needles. I think what had happened was that some stitches might have fallen off the ends of the needles in between sections and I hadn’t realized it. That meant that the pattern made an odd glitch. I’m knitting this mostly just to have something to knit, so I went back and undid the whole thing until I got to the problem spot, starting over from there.

I finally got done with the body of the shawl and went to work on the knitted-on border. Because the circumference of the shawl is pretty huge, this is a massive undertaking, as only every other border row gets knitted onto the shawl. I got a good way into it before I realized that somewhere along the way, I’d glitched and lost some stitches on the border pattern, so that that pattern began and ended with 9 stitches instead of 11 (it makes points, so it grows from 11, then shrinks back to 11). I undid it back to the error and started over. When I was really close to having the border done, I counted out the remaining shawl edge stitches and the number of border pattern rows I had left, and it was nowhere near even, not even off by just one or two. I looked back over the border and found a couple of places where I’d somehow forgotten the middle row — the border grows to a point, there’s a solid middle row at the peak with no patterned stitches, and then it shrinks from there, but I was going from the peak to the shrinking without the middle in a few places. Then I found another spot behind that where I’d done the 9 stitches instead of 11 thing. I ended up spending a couple of weeks undoing almost the entire border before starting again, and then there was a false start where I’d forgotten the pattern while I was undoing it all, so I was doing it wrong when I started again.

And that’s what I’ve been doing with the current book — I’d get into it, realize I started wrong, go back, and rewrite, realize that was wrong, go back and rewrite. Then I’d get almost done, realize it was all wrong, and go back. I finally finished it, then got feedback from my agent and started over again, then went back to the process of getting to a certain point in the book, realizing what I needed to fix, and going back to fix it.

At least with the book, I can save the parts that are right and insert them in, or I can go back and fix something wrong earlier in the book without erasing everything to that point. With the knitting, I have to undo some parts that are done right in order to reach the errors. The trick with the writing is figuring out what can be saved and what should be scrapped, and sometimes it’s easier to just rewrite a scene than to fix an old scene to fit a new scenario.

Maybe I’m being a perfectionist, but the result won’t be a thing I’m happy with unless I get it right. With the book, I’m hoping to get a new publisher who’ll be excited enough about it to actually put some effort into it, which means I have to make it great. With the knitting, since I’m knitting for the sake of having something to knit, I may as well make it something I’m proud of. Undoing and redoing it means I’m not having to buy more yarn to have something else to knit when I’m done.