How many times does the heavy hand of perfectionism weigh down your writer’s hand, make mincemeat of your ideas, and damn the flow of words in some Godlike pronouncement of failure?
Perfectionism doesn’t belong behind the writer’s curtain. But it sneaks in. It pretends to be your critic, dressed up in tweeds to look like a teacher. But its only lesson is a yardstick.
Beware the impostor. Don’t heed its pronouncements. Don’t take it at its word. Learn to recognize its presence.
How?
Watch for these three signs:
1. Endless rewrites that don’t make the piece any better
You’ve been fishing on the shore for months and the vacation is over and you’re still fishing, the same fish, hooked to the same hook. You’re casting that fish into the water and reeling it back in over and over again, and it’s no longer flopping. It’s resigned. It’s dead. And still you fish. Let go, my friend. Let go.
Do you want it perfect, or do you want it done?
We learn with each new project. We get better as a writer the more we write anew. So let go, release this overfished fish to the river of the world, and move on. There are other fish, and you will become a better fisher-person the more you unhook the old one and cast off for the new.
2. Hitting a wall in the first draft
First drafts are a playground. In a first draft you’re meant to swing up and down, crawl through tunnels of discovery, sift through sand for treasure, hoist yourself hither and yon, climb to new heights, take a slide now and then, and get swept away, dizzy and discombobulated. It’s a playground. So play. Let the kid in you wear red sneakers and striped socks, and smell a little wild. First drafts are not the time to sit on the bench with pursed lips and ponder.
3. Writer’s block
There are ways to write, and there are ways to right. One is a process and the other a straightjacket. One is a discovery and the other a mandate. One is an exploration and the other a rule. If you’re blocked, perfectionism is the block that is crushing you.
One way to get that weight off your back is to write spontaneous prose. Jack Kerouac coined the term. This is writing “without consciousness” on an image, without regard to punctuation; quickly and with great excitement. “Blow as deep as you want—write as deeply, fish as far down as you want, satisfy yourself first—” By tapping into the subconscious we bypass the nag, the critic, the perfectionist, and learn to trust what comes.
Another way is to write badly. On purpose. Oh, the joy, the freedom! Purposely write purple prose, grammarly gaffes, and passages so pathetic that perfectionism has no choice but to disassociate from you.
To defeat perfectionism, we must allow ourselves to be imperfect, which we are, whether we choose to admit it or not. So rise up! Show your flaws! Admit your mistakes! I’ll go so far as to say: deliberately leave something imperfect in what you write, and see if anybody notices.
For example…
Did you notice in my previous blog post, I claimed to have hiked at an elevation of 95 thousand feet? This was not a deliberate mistake. This was a bonafide blunder.
“You might want to change 95 thousand to 95 hundred,” my pops pointed out. “You’d have to be a pilot to reach 95 thousand.”
Did other readers notice the goof? I have no idea. Maybe yes. Maybe no. Maybe you did notice, and shrugged it off with the assumption that to me, 95 hundred feet on a hiking trail felt like 95 thousand feet. Which was true. But not as true as the fact that I need a good editor.
And I’m not perfect.
Takeaways this week:
Perfectionism is like arm wrestling, but you’re the only player without arms. You’ll never win. So don’t play.
Get comfortable with being imperfect. Deliberately mispell a word, like I did just now. And leave it. You might have to wrestle with your spellcheck to leave it alone, but make the effort.
Finish a piece, rewrite it two, three, eight times (not fifty), then let it go. Send it out. Your job is to create. It’s your editor’s job to make it perfect enough.
To find out more about spontaneous prose, check out The Portable Jack Kerouac, edited by Ann Charters.
