Maybe it was all that time spent as an editor, but even after seven years as a full-time writer, I still need reminding that writing—the actual writing of new words, one new word after the other—is its own thing. Starkly, fundamentally different in every way from everything else under the "writing" umbrella: cutting and pasting with abandon, polishing, re-reading for flow, thinking about what isn't working about a chapter while on the subway, tearing up a finished chapter into chunks and re-outlining it, etc.