Perfectionism

The other day I read a very excellent article on how to overcome perfectionism in your creative pursuits; the key is to learn to accept less than perfect results. Sounds pretty easy. I'll be focusing on writing simply because that is what I like and understand.

I'm a fan of the suggestions, that is, giving yourself a handicap (extreme time constraints, unusual criteria, or a more tangible handicap) when producing your work, which will help you to appreciate what you produce under these circumstances.

You want to hold yourself to much lower standards in order to push yourself to actually follow through with your creative endeavors.  It doesn't matter if it's bad, nobody (including yourself) is expecting perfection from you under these circumstances. - Mark Mahoney

This reminds me of National Novel Writing Month* (NaNo) which encourages the goal of producing a 50,000 word novel in only 30 days. I've participated for the past three years, mostly willingly, though it's slowly becoming more of a ritual. For most people, it's a large goal set within a small time constraint, and one of the most commonly heard suggestions to reach your goal is to write without editing, which is something that lots of people find very difficult.

It can be hard to see yourself as a writer of a specific caliber and then for 30 days produce work that feels so far below your usual standard that your first inclination upon finishing a sentence, a paragraph, or a chapter is to throw the whole thing away and never do it again.

It's the same as the feeling that I get when I try out a recipe I'm really excited about (like double chocolate m&m cookies) and enjoy everything about the process, then get to the very end, pull the cookies out and they're nothing like what I was expecting. They're misshapen and crumbly, not at all like the gooey, chewy, shiny cookies in the picture on the recipe. They don't even live up to the taste expectation, and I find that I can't eat more than half due to extreme disappointment. I end up leaving them in the kitchen for my roommates or taking them into work (if they're not embarrassingly bad).

Same with writing, but as there's less need to share, it's much easier to hide away writing that you hate and ensure it never sees the light of day. I have three half-written first-draft NaNovels on my hard drive, and only four people have seen them because I'm so embarrassed by the hastily constructed metaphors, overly flowery description (hey, I was trying to hit my daily word counts and needed to come up with something), meandering plots, and weak characters.

But...

But the goal of NaNo is to get you, as a writer, to finish your goddamned project. That's the first step. Finish a first draft, take a break, then rework your plot, rework your characters, rework your story, and write the second draft. Not everyone does things this way, but it allows you a second chance to tackle that imperfect draft you tossed aside at the end of November.

Maybe that's the way to quell that terrible perfectionism: constant improvement.

*National Novel Writing Month takes place in November, and more information can be found here. I highly recommend the challenge--you might go insane, but it's a ton of fun.