My mother taught me how to sew. We huddled over her 1960s Kenmore sewing machine, up in finished part of the attic, and I learned about bobbins, backstitching, and quarter-inch seams. I picked out patterns and learned how to trace the outlines of those tissue pattern pieces onto fabric. Like magic, I transformed something flat—fabric, rolled off big bolts that thump-thump-thumped on the fabric-store table when I bought my yardage—into a dress or shirt or, most memorably, a tapestry-fabric jumpsuit.

Loved that jumpsuit.

I haven’t sewn since high school, unless you count the slipcover I made for a living room chair. But I’ve been busy creating other things—most notably, stories. Today my mother reminded me of something from sewing that applies to the writing work I’m doing right now. It was something Baba, her grandmother and my great-grandmother, taught her about sewing.

“Nothing is worth making unless you rip it out three times,” she said.

Ripping out is just what it sounds like—you take a sharp, mean little tool and run it along your hard-won seams, ripping stitch by stitch until the two pieces of fabric fall away from each other. I sewed a lot in high school, which means I’m really good at ripping out seams too. You can’t avoid it. You get five steps into a pattern and realize that you messed up step 1B and now everything has to be ripped out, unless you want your shirt to have two and a half sleeves on it. And then you get to the eighth step and it happens all over again.

My beloved jumpsuit? The seams started to fray, in spots, because I had to rip it out so many times.

As for my writing, I’m now ripping out the seams on my story DROUGHT—for the third time. We’re talking some major ripping; shifting the timeline of the story back and cutting out a big BIG chunk of the current draft. It’s like I finished making that jumpsuit and realized I’ve got the right fabric, the right pattern, but I somehow managed to sew it inside out and backwards. Every little stitch has got to come out before I can make it the right way.  Sure, I could try wearing that jumpsuit out in public, and forget about fixing it, but there’d be no hiding that it wasn’t the best I could do. There would be way to conceal its flaws.

So I am taking a deep breath and picking up my stitch ripper. I’m not afraid: I have the fabric. I have the pattern. I cut everything into the right shape, and I wound my bobbin. I even have the buttons picked out.

I just have to find the right way to sew it all together.