When I was in my 20s, I tried to write a children’s story about two characters called Mr Gumshackle and Miss Leatherbarrow. Looking back, the idea was way too cute, and I was trying to be too clever, and I doubt if anyone except me would have been interested in reading it. That's part of the learning process, of course, writing badly over and over again until you start to improve. Or, as Samuel Beckett said, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

But the thing about this story was, I never got past the second paragraph. I was stuck, trying to make the beginning perfect. I rewrote it over and over again, obsessing over individual words. I took them out and put them back in again, I moved them around, I tried to make them sound more impressive. And all this time, I had no idea what was going to happen after the beginning.

I was reminded of Mr Gumshackle and Miss Leatherbarrow last year when I was chatting to a friend who was studying nursing. She was up to her back teeth in assignments and essays, and struggling to get them done. And after we’d talked for a bit, it became clear that she was doing that obsessing-over-individual-words thing – trying to get the first paragraph of the assignment perfect before she moved onto the next part.

So I told her about how these days my first draft is always a discovery draft, and how I try to get the whole story down before I go back and fix it. And how all experienced writers know that finished is better than perfect, because perfect doesn’t exist, and if you go looking for it, you end up down a rabbit hole that never ends. Then I suggested she do a quick and dirty outline of her current assignment, without doing any more research, without obsessing, without worrying if it was right or not.

And she did it! She dropped in later that night with her outline, with a much better idea of where the assignment was going and of how much she already knew. And much less panic.

I still get stuck sometimes. Still find myself staring at the blank page, trying to come up with just the right sentence to begin a book. Or obsessing over a word that no one but me is going to care about. So this was a really nice reminder. Just start writing and see what happens. See where the story takes you. Forget perfect. Get it finished.

. . .

My father loved driving, which was probably just as well, because we lived in Launceston while his mother and sisters lived in Hobart. So at the beginning of every school holidays our family would hop in the car and dad would drive us down the Midlands Highway to visit my grandmother and aunts.

He was a great storyteller, my father. But he also had a strong moral code, and one of the most telling lessons my brothers and I learned from him on those long drives was that if you hit a rabbit or a wallaby, you had to stop the car and check. It might be night-time. It might be the middle of a cold Tasmanian winter. Regardless, you got out of the car and searched until you found whatever you’d hit. And if it was badly hurt, you put it out of its misery. No excuses, said dad, because your squeamishness didn’t count when you measured it against the pain and terror of the animal you had just injured. You put your own feelings to one side, and did it.

So a while ago I was driving out to Richmond to look for jam apricots, and saw a baby rabbit that someone had hit, lying in the middle of the road. I have no idea how long it had been there, but everyone else was DRIVING STRAIGHT PAST (excuse the shouting, but I feel very strongly about this.) And yes, it was perfectly obvious that the poor creature was still alive. It was trying to drag itself off the road, but its hindquarters weren't working.

I stopped and walked back, trying to figure out the best way to kill it. Dad used to bash their heads against the nearest telegraph pole, and I've done that in the past, but it's hard to be sure that you've killed them with the first blow, which of course is the whole point, to minimise pain and give a good quick death.

This was a very small rabbit, however, so I took a deep breath, apologised ... and wrung its neck. I'd never done that before, but I knew the theory. And it worked. A couple of spasms, and it was gone. Quickest, most pain-free death possible.

I sat with it by the side of the road for 10 minutes or so, just to be sure. And to keep it company, wherever it was going. Then I went on my way, with a picture in my head of my father smiling and nodding his approval.

This article was first published in issue 94 of Forty South magazine.

Before Lian Tanner settled down in southern Tasmania to write internationally acclaimed fantasy novels, she did lots of stuff such as being dynamited while scuba diving and arrested while busking. She once spent a week in the jungles of Papua New Guinea hunting for a Japanese soldier left over from the Second World War. Learn more about her at liantanner.com.au.