Perfection is Overrated
I’ve stared at this article for the better part of an hour.
Dedication, you might call it, were you the flattering type (thanks!). Idiocy, you might counter, if you weren’t. But let’s label it perfectionism, the bane of the diligent writer, and the whole messy reason I’ve rewritten this introductory sequence three times over.
I’m tempted to rewrite it again.
That’s the terrible truth of it: perfectionism, celebrated in fields that demand little attachment to your work, proves a dangerous hurdle for folks who make a living off the sweat, blood and tears they pour onto the page. Think I’m being dramatic? Tally up each and every unfinished story on your hard
drive. Count, too, each draft sitting a simple click away from going live on your website. Now – the best part! – consider where you might be right now if every single one of those projects had seen the light of day.
My own number settles somewhere between embarrassing and horribly depressing. Excuses? I’ve got plenty: too little time, a lack of inspiration, etc. The truth, naturally, hits a lot harder. I’m a perfectionist. Everything I write must visibly gleam on the page, diction so shiny and golden that it affords new meaning to the moniker ‘wordsmith.’
But life, ladies and gentleman, doesn’t play that nice. That’s admirable ambition, sure, but a goal unrealistic for the regular writer – the kind, y’know, trying to afford things like bread and toys off the bounty of the gray stuff between his ears. Striking it big proves a lot easier when the words shine at least silver, but here comes the reality check: if I’m too much of a perfectionist to ever call my work complete, hours spent perfecting every single word do little beyond waste precious time.
I don’t advocate sending your work off the moment you finish, mind. Taking time off afterward can prove a great help to the exhausted writer, but there comes a point when you have to stop rephrasing sentences every time you pull the words up on your screen.
Found Guilty
Obvious confession: I’m guiltier than the rest. A story of mine still lurks on my hard drive from nearly two years back, one that could have seen sunlight were I not so picky about the final product. The constant need to rewrite should already flash as a warning sign, but imagine that process pushed to an agonizing end – reluctance to even revisit the work, to sitting down with the words your own mind convinces you will never be just right.
Your brain does fine work in many cases. Telling you when to drop the editing pen isn’t one of them. But that’s a hard truth to swallow, especially for us poor writer types, and the kind of realization that only clicks when weeks – or months, or years – have passed since you last sat down with your story and tried to tighten it up.
Don’t do what I do, folks. Don’t obsess over minor details and waste countless hours debating the impact of each word on the audience. Give your work its due diligence, of course, but realize that there’s a point when just one more revision will do so much more harm than good.
Your words will thank you for the chance to breathe. And you’ll take away something too: the chance to channel your creative energy into a new project, maybe, without leaving the last one cold and unloved on your desktop. You might even come away with new respect for the countless books and stories crowding the store shelves. Are they perfect?
Of course not. But at least their authors knew when to let go, right?
How do you get over your perfectionism when it comes to your writing? Or do you?
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Matt Madeiro is a part-time vagabond, part-time grammar snob, and full-time unemployed. He devotes his time and energy to self-improvement blog Three New Leaves, nurturing it like his own virtual child, offering advice on travel, exercise and living a more minimalist lifestyle. The tweets? They’re just for kicks.
I’m an amateur perfectionist – [ heheh :) ; cause there's still some imperfect part left in me ]
Wow! Your fluent, amazing vocabulary really glimpsed me your perfect inside.
Nice article !
Thanks a lot, Vidit!
We might all be amateur perfectionists, honestly. :)
Thanks for reading!
Oh, I hear you loud and clear. I am a perfectionist procrastinator who suffers daily of trying to craft every layer of a project into a masterpiece. Steven Pressfield says that I suffer from Resistance, and I have to agree.
The hardest obstacle to overcome (other than procrastination) is perfectionism. Nothing we create is ever going to be perfect. This is a hard lesson I’ve had to stomach – and that took a lot of Mylanta! I can work. I can write. I can edit. I can put it out there. And whatever my feelings about the shortcomings on this project I can put toward the next project. This is the only way to grow professionally.
Make mistakes. Learn. Get your hands dirty. Take a few hits, stand up, dust yourself off and try again. It’s never going to be perfect, get over it (and yes, easier said than done). But that doesn’t mean it won’t be good enough, or even great!
“Perfectionist procrastinator.” You and me both, my good man. :)
Realizing that we’re not perfect is no doubt one of the hardest things for writers to swallow. I had something approaching a breakdown a few days back on my blog, haha, where I finally got sick and tired of staring at a blank wordpress post and thinking that I couldn’t fill it with anything approaching good work.
The resulting angry rant, despite being directed entirely at myself, might be some of the best writing I’ve done in weeks. :)
I really like your last paragraph right there. That’s pretty much all the advice a writer could ever need, consolidated down into a few simple sentences. I wish it were as easy to follow it, of course, but that’s the nature of life advice – learning and following it is a life-long struggle.
Gloomy? Yep. Doable? Definitely.
Thanks for reading and responding, Eric!
Hello, my name is Lisa and I’m a perfectionist. This is the PA group, isn’t it?
I do the same thing. I re-attack my work always thinking whatever I’m writing could be better because it’s just not good enough–yet. If I just change that word, or rearrange this sentence, or find a better metaphor for an idea . . . usually I know enough is enough when I re-edit to the point that I come full circle and return the prose to its original form. Perhaps that’s what Eliot meant when he said “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started”?
The truth of the matter is, we just have to stop being so damned egotistical. Really. It’s not our insecurity saying we might not be good enough, therefore we have to struggle over every word. It’s the audacity of calling ourselves writers, artists, which makes us believe we can only create perfect pieces that live up to our standards. We need that bravado–otherwise we would never touch our keyboards. But we also need to learn not to take it so seriously. After all, once our work makes it to a publisher, they often find even more shit for us to change.
Closest thing to a PA group I’ve ever seen, at least. :) Not the expected result, but it’s secretly delightful to see the community rallying together!
That has to be one of the hardest parts, of course, to downsize your ego and admit that your work will never be absolutely perfect. The very nature of the medium, I think, tricks us into thinking it can be. It’s just a matter of rewriting it, after all. Just a little more editing, a little more revision, and our words will be the best – guaranteed!
We both know, however, that’s not the case. Lesson learned, I guess…the hard way. :)
Thanks for reading!
I don’t. I don’t know if I can get over it. It usually takes a deadline to push my work kicking and screaming into the world. :)
In college, I remember every paper I turned in would have me thinking “this is the worst thing I’ve ever written.” That hasn’t changed. I have a regular gig writing music reviews for a website, and fortunately, my editor is extremely gracious when it comes to me pushing the deadlines. (It helps that we’re both night owls, so even if I send it at 1 in the morning, it’s not late.)
Once, after a particularly difficult piece, I e-mailed it off, thinking it was crap and wondering why I put myself through so much torture. He e-mailed me back almost immediately with a comment that it was nice to get submissions that he didn’t have to edit before posting. Really? So I guess sometimes perfectionism pays off. Usually the finished product is better than you think!
Haha! I always thought the same thing, especially whenever handing over the long research papers. By the time I’d sent it over to my professor, I’d already degraded the paper into 10-12 pages of the absolute worst writing imaginable…only to receive a surprisingly pleasant grade.
In that sense, I’d have to agree – holding on to a paper for a bit longer than usual probably would increase the quality overall. But that’s a dangerous line to walk, I imagine, when just a few steps further would put you squarely in the vicious cycle I described above.
I’m glad you’ve avoided it so far! I’m not so lucky, I guess, given the graveyard of rough drafts collecting dust on my hard drive. And maybe that’s the difference: so long as you know when to let go and put the piece out there, perfectionism isn’t always a villain.
Or maybe you’re just special. ;)
Thanks for reading, Jen!
Perfectionism sucks. That’s why I write at scribbleplay.com — where it’s just about scribbling it as fast as possible instead of getting it “right.”
That sounds like a great idea! I’ll have to check it out.
Thanks for reading!
Bloody hell, I could have written this article. It sounds so much like how I feel it’s uncanny!
I’ve just now written a post on my own blog, and it really took me so much longer than it should have because I was rewriting bits, changing things, worrying whether it was good enough. It’s just a simple blog post! Not even saying anything particularly profound or interesting. And yet still I wanted it to be perfect.
We have to let go. Like Eric said above, it’s the hardest advice to follow, but in essence it’s that simple. We writers would be a lot more successful if we remembered that creation isn’t about perfection. It’s about CREATING! About making something, writing something, and then putting it out there, showing someone and saying “whadya think?”
Great post Matt!
“It’s about CREATING!”
Exactly! That’s so hard to realize, but it really helps to take a step back and think about what makes you happiest. For me, it’s the act of writing and creating in the first place, but also putting my work out into the wild to open up for feedback and interaction with an audience.
Perfectionism, naturally, tends to pop up right in between those two. But I’m slowly starting to realize that I don’t have to put up such a big fight before letting the words out of their cage – I’ll get feedback no matter how many times I revise an article, since readers come for content way before form. :)
Thanks for reading, Chris!
Nice read you re totally right.
Thanks, Donovan! And thanks for reading!
When it comes to writing, you get over perfectionism by practising. There’s no way around. To become a good writer, it’s advised to write at least 200 words a day. Deadlines help a lot. What we have to acknowledge is that the writing process is not so much about the end result, i.e. what you have come up with, as it is about all the stuff you leave out. Writing is equal to leaving out. The more you know about a subject, the more you realise you have to leave out. The end result wouldn’t exist without it. It’s a pain, but without practise, there’s no gain.
Yep. What’s the best way to become a writer?
Just write!
That applies to perfectionism, too. The more you practice putting words on a page, the easier it becomes to recognizing when they’re already as good as they’re going to get.
Thanks for reading, Stig!
When you or another reader/writer/commenter finds a cure for Paralysis by Perfection, please share. I hear you, feel your pain and empathize with you.
Haha! Will do, Susan. Rest assured it’ll be my holy grail for the rest of my writing career.
Thanks so much for reading! :)
I am not sure how I can form the words to say how you can get over trying to be perfect in writing. Of course, we are not perfect and life is not perfect as you mentioned before in the blog but I do know that if we can not be perfect than why stress ourselves to make our writing perfect. Yes, we should strive for the best and not allow errors happen in the writing world.
I don’t believe how over compensating yourself can help you achieve “perfect” writing. But isn’t writing suppose to be creative? So, why are we (as a blogger, writer, Public relation person) trying to make writing perfect when it is perfect in its own unique way.
Procrastination is the reason it took me so long to complete my book. You have to just go for it.
I have the ticking clock syndrome, hence I’m not really into perfectionism. Once I start writing, I just want to see my article or blog post finished, I do my best at holding it back though.
I’m learning to deal with it, and I know that this is one of my biggest hurdles. Knowing is a step in the right direction.
One of my friends is a painter, a really good one. His problem is what you describe, he never finishes any of his paintings. He’s never satisfied, they can always be better. He looks at them, over and over again. If he doesn’t finish what he started, he will always be an unknown man with a job he hates, although I think he really can make a living painting.
I only began writing as much as I’d like when I started writing how I paint, which chaotically.
With paint, it’s about chaos and lack of control. Letting it flow and seeing what happens.
With words, it can be the exact same as long as the writer isn’t obsessing about the future (writing career, selling a book, New York Times best seller, etc.)
If you approach your medium with the notion that you have absolutely no control, not just over your creations but life as a whole, then you’ll free yourself from your own expectations of what you think is required to start your writing career, selling a book, or becoming a New York Times best seller.
It’s about letting go.