Do You Struggle with Perfectionism in Your Writing? Try These Three Things
A wrestling match with perfectionism can be debilitating to the point that nothing gets finished. On the other hand, if you know your writing could be better, when do you stop trying to improve a piece so you can let it go and move on?
As a frequent rider on the perfectionism train, I know firsthand the effects of this particular struggle. The what-ifs can be crippling to the point of exhaustion. What if I share this but it’s not as good as I can make it, so no one reads it? What if people start reading but lose interest because it’s not gripping enough or informative enough or empowering enough, or entertaining enough or... perfect enough?
For those of us who grew up in environments with penalties for not “doing it right,” those early messages and our behavioral adaptations may resurface as perfectionistic tendencies. As pre-conscious children, we’re so dependent on our caregivers as to adopt their perspectives and try to please them in order to simply survive. Adaptation for survival is necessary. The challenge is that parents arrive to their roles with their own histories, subconscious beliefs, and deeply held perspectives, then pass them along to the next generation.
Subconscious perspectives onboarded in childhood can run deep enough that we assume they’re empirically true. Whether or not we’re consciously aware of the origins of our perspectives and beliefs, they show up in our habits, underlying thinking, assumptions, and motivations. Perfectionism tendencies can show up in thoughts such as:
Doing it right is my top priority.
No one will like me if I mess up.
Mistakes are bad.
I won’t stop until it’s perfect.
If I don’t do my very best I’ll be rejected.
Any imperfections will be punished.
If you know or suspect that you struggle with perfectionism, what are your particular thought patterns around it? Do certain situations seem to trigger greater pressure in you to do it right? Do you feel like something in your childhood got you into a habit of associating doing it the right way and not making mistakes with approval?
As you engage in activities where perfectionistic discomfort rises, see if you can zero in on what’s happening inside. Does this discomfort show up in the voice of someone from your childhood, or from a relationship later in life, in which you got the message that doing things right was good and/or doing things wrong was bad?
What does approval feel like in your body? Where in your body does a “mistake” land? How might you feel if you didn’t “fix” a mistake, but just let it go instead and kept moving?
Playing around with the questions above and the suggestions below and taking action on them can open the way to options and relief. Awareness starts the ball rolling. I know from my own experiences of using the modes below (and talking with others who have tried them) that perfectionism’s tight grip really can be relaxed and converted from a consuming imperative to achieve the unachievable into a manageable interest in quality.
Here are three suggestions for loosening the grip of perfectionism in your writing and creative life:
1) Redefine “mistakes” as good things.
What if you shifted your definition of mistake to reclaim it as a positive? Like this: A mistake is an unexpected option, an opportunity.
One day while working at a friend’s office, I struggled to navigate a complicated online login process, growing increasingly exasperated. “Argh!” I (actually) said. “How many mistakes do I have to make before I figure this out?” My friend looked up from his computer and said cheerfully, “Lots!” Determined not to be irritated, I said, “Well, the trick is to focus and stop screwing up.” He said, “No. Mistakes want to be made. I mean, imagine if you were a mistake. You’d want to have an existence. We need mistakes to exist.”
Mistakes exist. Not only that, they exist for a reason. Always have. Always will. When we give them room to exist, we alter the flavor of their definition from bad to hmm. Hmm implies interest, with judgment in abeyance. A hmm can much more easily contribute to a work of art than something considered to be bad.
In other words, it’s possible to find some relief from perfectionism by moving away from a strict right-wrong, black-white, yes-no stance and into... curiosity.
2) Practice letting it be “wrong.”
You won’t magically stop seeing things that could be better. Flaws will pulse like beacons, begging you to allocate more attention to them, to eliminate them altogether. When you feel the discomfort of noticing a flaw, you have the option of deciding how to respond. It’s possible to feel the discomfort, allow it, and keep moving forward anyway.
What does this look like? If you’re writing a novel, it might look like highlighting an iffy word, paragraph, or section to take another look at later, and then continuing to write forward. If you’re writing an article, it could mean revising the scope or the audience or the intended publication venue to reduce the pressure to perform at a standard that currently triggers your perfectionism, so you can take a deeper breath and have more fun.
A boss I once had noticed how much time and energy I spent trying to do a good job. When we talked about it, I told her that, for me, doing a good job meant trying to get an A+ grade on every single thing I did, period. She smiled and told me she only expected me to bring my C+ job performance to her company. My boss wasn’t a perfectionist. Her goal was to get shit done. By noticing my behavior and offering me a different perspective, she made my work a lot easier, while also making her business more effective.
3) Bring in finishing energy.
A shift of priorities can go a long way toward resolving inner debates around perfectionism. Instead of keeping your focus on how good you can make your project in terms of quality, experiment with focusing on finishing. Perfection energy and finishing energy don’t exist in the same space because they’re mutually exclusive. Perfect is impossible, so it will take forever. Finished is absolutely achievable. When you’re creating something, decide how you will know when it’s finished. For example:
when next Monday at 5 p.m. arrives
when the editor tells me to have it done by
two weeks before the gallery opening
by the next meeting of my writing group
In order to meet that type of deadline, trying to also deliver something perfect will create a rift in the universe. Don’t go there.
When I worked as a managing editor at a publishing firm, I was assigned to work with an author whose book draft came in way, way over the recommended page-count. Part of my job was to provide the author with edits at all levels of her manuscript, a task that needed to be done on a deadline bound by the book’s committed publication date. No way could I do an edit anywhere near perfect, which at first sent me into a tizzy. I jettisoned perfect and got busy with finishing. In that instance, I paid out of my own pocket for a freelance editor to share the work so we could do the job in double-time. The result was well worth the extra bit of expense.
Rewards can be a motivating and refreshing consolation when working with finishing energy. In addition to deciding on a non-perfect criteria for how you’ll know when a piece is finished, you can plan the reward you’ll get when you’re done. Make it personalized and enticing. The first time I ever completed a first draft of a novel, I did it because I really, really wanted to collect my reward of all three extended-play, deluxe, boxed sets of the Lord of the Rings movies trilogy. Hey, whatever it takes.
To win the wrestling match with perfectionism, befriend your own imperfection as perfect. Relish your “mistakes” as tools of your creative expansion. Reclaim playfulness and curiosity and wonder—all of which meander and spiral and on the way to discovery.
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Grace Kerina is a writing coach with more than twenty years of experience helping authors find their true voices and the author of Personal Boundaries for Highly Sensitive People. To receive notification of new resources and writing tips, sign up for her mailing list here. She also writes novels as Alice Archer.