How Perfectionism Blocks My Writing
Letting myself be human has been the most difficult lesson on the road to being a writer. As a perfectionist, I hate making mistakes. As a human, mistakes are unavoidable. The clash between the two makes writing very difficult. In fact, my perfectionism blocks my writing all the damn time. Now, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Being a perfectionist forces me to do my due diligence and ensure things are correct. This tendency picks up on spelling and punctuation errors quickly, but it hinders me in three major ways.
From Brain to Page
Most of the early stages of my writing take place all in my head. With as much and as widely as I read, ideas churn constantly in my head. Most are terrible, but every once in a while, a good one screams loud enough to get my attention. I’ll follow the idea down certain logical pathways, and I’ll compose paragraphs – sometimes whole essays – in my mind before I prepare to sit at the keyboard. These compositions soar, make the necessary logical connections, and flow sentence to sentence. As soon as I type the first word, though, everything comes out terrible. Why would anyone be interested in this subject? Why does every sentence start with the words “the” or “that”? How are idea “A” and “B” connected again? Why don’t the words in my brain ever survive the trip down my arms to my fingertips? I honestly do not know; though, I suspect gremlins and/or underpants gnomes.
Seriously, I hate everything that I type – including this sentence – as soon as I type it. The elegant thoughts in my head become clunky, ill-considered, and illogical. Attempting to fix this, to get back to the beautiful thing that exists only in my mind, I stop writing. No new words appear on the paper. No supporting arguments get made. Instead, I try to remember what I originally thought before typing, but those exact thoughts are fleeting and gone.
To combat this, I told myself that no one had to see the first draft, that if I could write it down, I could come back and fix it later. Any and all attempts to chase the ephemeral thoughts yields the same results as chasing the wind. It took a long time for me to come to this realization at the price of many projects started but never progressed beyond a few paragraphs – some not even beyond the first sentence. To avoid this block, it took viewing my creative process through the lens of an engineer. When I compared the manufacturing process with writing, it helped ease this need for perfection right off the bat. Every project in the beginning has a rough, imprecise part, but it moves through that phase to the next and the next and the next until it becomes the finished product. So, I began to think of my writing as a manufacturing process rather than a craft one. Maybe this will someday come back to bite me in the ass, but right now it works for me.
Alternative strategy: Follow other authors on twitter to see that they struggle as well and don’t just flop out perfect final drafts on the first go ’round.
No Need for Editing
Once I get a first draft down on paper, my brain – despite all contrary evidence – says done! The words on the paper become grooves into which my brain falls and sees no escape from. Frankly, why would it because that bit of writing is perfect as is. Except, of course, it’s not. But being a perfectionist means that I see the finished work the first time that I set it down. This closes down alternate avenues of thought; or, when a fictional scene fails, instead of trying to fix it, I force the story to continue. To simplify, the perfectionism makes me rigid, which is the enemy of creativity and thought. Unable to see fixes or alternate paths forward, I lose interest in the goal that I’m trying to accomplish. The negative me says that a better writer would figure it out; so, you must not be a good writer.
This no-need-for-revision mentality is my greatest struggle still. I learned that I was too close to what I had just created. Stephen King in On Writing recommends setting the finished manuscript aside and starting a new project immediately. While shoving the manuscript in a drawer for six months won’t help me, I like the idea of separating myself from the finished product. Becoming detached from the work itself allows me to view it in an editorial light. So, I have a couple of strategies to detach from my work. Since I write on the laptop, the first strategy is editing on hardcopies of the article. Print out the work and edit it line by line. Of course, this can be expensive and wasteful – please, recycle – it also no longer resembles the work. Seeing it on the screen for so long, I am accustomed to seeing it on a screen. Seeing it on ink and paper, changes perspective. If that doesn’t work, then another strategy is to edit in a different format, such as PDFs, EPubs, or Kindle files. Compiling the document into this other format also shifts perspective. If possible, read through this different format on a different device than the one used to create it. I make it as unfamiliar as I can. Finally, if this doesn’t work, at the very least, I take a day between finishing and editing. By putting a sleep cycle between creating and editing, my brain detaches from the work. The more that my mind thinks of different subject, the more detachment I get.
Alternate strategy: Ask someone to read the finish work and give their thoughts. For a first draft, this strategy is risky because the draft won’t be very good. I do not recommend this alternate strategy, but I have done it.
Stop Editing!
Irony loves the perfectionist. Once I start editing, the problem then switches to an inability to stop editing. As I tear into my lovely new creation, I edit and then set aside. When I come back to it, I edit some more. This cycle repeats until I think that I have a final draft. To be absolutely sure, I set the project aside for one more time. Then I go back to read it before posting, submitting, or whatever. Without fail, I find more to edit. There is always one more thing to add or another way to phrase an idea. Could I restate this with fewer words? (Spoiler: The answer is most often yes.) On one, and only one, project, I tracked all the edits that I made. The document looked like every single word had a line through it at one point. To be clear, a lot of editing is often needed for my work. By default, I have a very corporate method of writing since by day I’m an engineer. Editing helps me move from stilted sentences and summary to something readable, but at some point, the law of diminishing returns kicks in. If I spend eternity laboring over the same work, I’ll never meet my goals of submitting it.
Knowing when to stop editing took me many years and a stint at the University of Missouri – St. Louis’s Master of Fine Arts program. I do not believe that I’ll ever feel like I’ve got a handle on this skill. I find changes on my writing that is published, here and elsewhere, but I’ve learned that nothing I create will ever be perfect. The trade-off is between working on one piece for the rest of my life or living with an imperfect creation. Mindfulness helps me find the tipping point between needs work and time to submit. By this, I mean am I revising a lot of material or am I playing around with a few sentences here and there? Have I started adding new material that doesn’t add anything to the project? Am I still cutting? Am I replacing what I just cut? These are questions that I pay attention to while editing. Learning where that tipping is has taken a long time, and I can’t say with certainty that I know where it is.
Alternative strategy: Find beta readers to provide feedback. If someone is willing to line edit, there is no greater feedback. Lots of markup means that the piece needed more attention. A little feedback likely means that the decision to submit was the right one.
Remembering Why I Write
Over the years, I’ve learned to deal with my perfectionist tendencies because I keep in mind what I writer. Books, articles, scholarly journals, the written word is the medium that’s sustained me throughout my life. Books and reading are the one constant in my life from a young age until now. My family tells stories of me always creating, always imaginative, when I was younger. Frankly, it’s never stopped, and since then, I’ve learned that I think best when writing. The act slows down my thoughts and allows me to step through problems. When I’m mindful of this, then all the hurtles perfectionism places in my path become challenges. Instead of obstructions, they become opponents to overcome. With the strategies I described, perfectionism can be defeated to continue writing and to advance towards my goals.