you have to be ruthless about presenting it

If you’re not ruthless about your work, you can’t be an artist of interest. Once something crystallizes, you have to be ruthless about presenting it; it doesn’t matter who gets hurt, starting with yourself. Your message in the ear of the reader is going to be worth the damage that’s done. You’ve got to be impersonal; you can’t look back. If, on the other hand, you go in the other direction and start thinking, “Will writing about this experience hurt me?”—well, then, you’re a bad writer, the kind who spends his life humping for The New Yorker. You spend your life hurting other people—not yourself.

NORMAN MAILER