There comes a point in every project when the project starts to assume its true form. Until then you are mostly going on instinct, feeling your way along as you push up hill, because the thing isn’t quite right yet.
But then at some point things turn a corner. The unfortunate decisions you’d made at first start to fall away. Some of those were the decisions that got you thinking about the project in the first place, before you quite knew where it was headed. Now they’re just holding things back.
Right about now I’m at such a turning point. The first weeks of the project I’m working on were mostly spent building tools, trying things out, demoing to friends and colleagues and listening to their criticisms.
One thing that’s great about those demos is that you often hear the same criticisms from different people — people who don’t even know each other. And usually they are about features that you’d fallen in love with.
How easily we are blinded by love for our own creations. That is why we often need other people to point out when they are just in the way. As Faulkner wisely said, “Kill your darlings.”