“I once heard an anecdote about a writer who’d spent a week in his apartment working on his novel, without a break. Compassionate friends finally dragged him away to dinner for the sake of sanity, and for a much needed breather.

“What did you get done this week?” the writer’s chums inquired.

“In the mornings, I put in a comma,” he answered gloomily, “and at night, I took it out again.”

Perhaps the guy had a creative block, who knows? But I’ll wager he’d also neither read nor followed the great Ray Bradbury’s advice in his book, “Zen in the Art of Writing.”

“This afternoon, burn down the house,” Bradbury wrote. “Tomorrow, pour critical water upon the simmering coals.”

In other words: don’t judge what you’re writing while you’re at it. Reserve your critiques for the editing phase. That’s the time to correct errors.

Of course, Bradbury is saying, the creative and judgement moods must be separated. Failing to recognize this is one sure way to get nothing done but spin your wheels, like our unfortunate writer with his vexing comma. When the creative fire is under you, go nuts.

It has taken me years to learn this. And I am nowhere near where I want to be. I can still slip back into doing it wrong and get nothing done. That’s because I am naturally wordy, and the hardest thing for me — as for many others — is to write simply; to say what you want to say in as few words as possible. It’s like having too many teeth in one’s mouth.

One of the notable exceptions I make to the Bradbury rule is when I compose these columns. They often take several days of rumination — getting up, doing something else, checking out the accuracy of a quote from some long gone writer, sleeping on it, coming back to the task with a new angle.

A terrifying dilemma is to be at deadline, staring at a blank page. I take psychological comfort seeing actual words upon a page, even if I know instinctively what I’ve written “ain’t much.” Ain’t much can be fixed.

So, finding alternatives is for the editing phase, and its functions are located in a different part of the brain than the creative part. Which we all have.

As Rudyard Kipling wrote: “Praise be to Allah who gave me two separate sides to my head.” Use them.

Now, as to editing.

I know of too many people who sneer at editing, insisting that what they’ve just written needs no correction because, by God, it was inspired, and don’t you touch it, or I’ll break your fingers!

I know of a woman who’d written a potentially great book, but it was filled with thousands of spelling errors. What a shame.

Now I’m sure there are geniuses out there who can produce pristine copy without batting an eye. Winston Churchill could not. He worked and reworked his speeches. It appears Lewis Carroll could, according to what his printer said. But for most of us mortals, it’s not an avenue. And it could result in fatal errors.

First thing to do is separate yourself from your manuscript for a time to clear your head. This makes that distance possible.

Then get to reworking it. Fix the spelling errors, resolve the confusion of singular verb and plural noun and vice versa, repair those nonsensical shifts in tense, show that ill-chosen adjective or preposition or adverb the door. I don’t know about you, but stupid errors tell me the writer didn’t care enough, and the easiest thing for me to do is put the book down and never pick it up again.

Have I made mistakes? Absolutely. In the past three years, I’ve made a few because my fingers aren’t as nimble as they once were because of certain medicines I take.

Be ruthless. Perhaps you’re in love with a purple phrase, but deep down, something tells you it’s a stinkeroo — pee-ew. The old saying is you have to be willing to “kill your darlings.”

Part of the key is knowing your stuff thoroughly. Read a lot. And get the rules down, so you’ll know when to break them.

Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@auburn-reporter.com.