I can't take credit for that title - it's a quote from Roddy Doyle, one of my favorite authors.  I'm always interested when people who excel at their craft try to explain how they do what they do.  Often they simply can't explain it - they may have an instinctive talent, or they may have achieved their mastery without reflecting on how they achieved it.  In law school, I found that several of my professors fell into the first category.  For each case we studied, they could explain what the decision was and how the court had reached it.  They obviously understood how the cases fit together to create an analytical framework that courts would use to decide other questions of law, but for some reason, few of them could explain that framework to us.*  And of course that's what we needed to know for the exams. 
Sometimes, though, you get lucky and find a true teacher.  Prof. Erwin Chemerinksy is one - he wrote the Con Law treatise, the one every law student relies on to pass Con Law and, later, the bar.  The late and much-missed Prof. Charlie Whitebread was another.  If you know him from BarBri, then I bet you remember why bestiality will never be addressed on the MBE. 
This is all a long way to tell you about a really interesting article I read this week, Ten Rules for Writing Fiction.  Roddy Doyle, PD James, Margaret Atwood, Elmore Leonard, and several other writers give some interesting, and sometimes conflicting advice.  There are some very specific pointers (from Margaret Atwood, "Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes."), and some that are more general (from Neil Gaiman: "Write.").  My favorite is No. 8 from Roddy Doyle: "Do change your mind. Good ideas are often murdered by better ones. I was working on a novel about a band called the Partitions. Then I decided to call them the Commitments."  This is great advice in the kind of work I do.  I'll frequently attack a brief or a research question from one perspective, only later to realize that it makes much more sense to approach it from a different angle.  I find the same thing in knitting - for example, I recently finished an original project, a vest with a lace pattern on the bodice.  I put it to the side and never wore it, and eventually I figured out why - the lace pattern is entirely wrong.  I think I finally have the right stitch in mind, so over the next few weeks I'm going to rip it out and rework it.
It's hard to abandon your work in favor of something different - in my briefs, it means I have to do more research and redraft something I thought was right the first time, and that, likely, I stayed up late in crafting.  In knitting, I have to frog, and I hate to frog.  But as another of my favorite artists says, when something's not right it's wrong.  If you want to do great work, then you can't afford to be attached to it.  You have to be willing to throw it out and start again. 
Also, if you haven't yet I highly recommend that you read some Roddy Doyle.  The first of his novels that I read was The Woman Who Walked Into Doors.  He channels the voice of a battered woman realistically, making her sympathetic but not always likable.  Years later, I picked up A Star Called Henry and couldn't put it down.  And I just recently got around to reading the Commitments.  Roddy Doyle's books are smart, unsentimental and realistic, even when, in the case of A Star Called Henry, they're occasinally implausible. 

* It's also possible that they were being deliberately unhelpful because wanted to weed out the students who couldn't figure it out themselves.