Taming your inner perfectionist

Perfectionist tendencies are often the writer’s biggest obstacle.

In the last few days I’ve met a memoirist who was stuck polishing her first chapter over and over and a thought leadership author who kept backing up and revising his primary model idea based on feedback from whomever he spoke with last. These writers seem intent on embracing first-draft perfection, and I feel they may never complete a manuscript, let alone publish it. If are a perfectionist like this, you could be falling into the same trap.

The fatal allure of perfection

These things are true for me as an author, and probably for you:

• I would never publish a book that I thought wasn’t perfect: if you’re reading it in print (or in an ebook or listening to an audiobook), it has to be flawless.
• Deadlines are real. You have to turn in (or abandon) the manuscript at some point.
• I’m not happy with the first draft of anything I write. I know it has problems. More problems become apparent over time.
• The best way to see if something you want to write has problems is to try to write it. The second-best way is to share it with people you trust, including a developmental editor.
• It gnaws at me to know things I’ve written have problems. I really want to fix them.

This is the psychology of writing. If you act just based on your emotions, it leads you to endlessly polish what you wrote, as if you must make it perfect before you can move on.

That way lies madness.

It’s wasteful and frustrating . . . and ultimately, fruitless. Because once you move on to other parts of the manuscript, you’re going to find things you want to go back and change. So that chapter you’ve polished to a high sheen? You’re going to end up rewriting it anyway.

Don’t pursue perfection. Pursue completeness . . . and tone.

Write this down. Post it where you can see it. Refer to it often:

At the start of writing, the writer’s objectives are (1) to generate useful material and (2) to explore tone . . . not to create finished prose.

This is a completely different mindset. Let’s consider the two parts of this set of objectives. Before doing either, lock your inner perfectionist in the closet. Tell them you’ll get back to them later.

Generating useful material

You cannot write the beginning (or the middle) until you know what the whole book is going to include.

This seems impossible. How can you know the whole book when you’ve written nothing?

This is the purpose of outlines. Create a list of chapters, and for each one, identify what reader question it answers. Structure that list into a sequence that draws the reader through the book.

When you’re ready to write a chapter, start with a fat outline that lists what’s in the chapter in what order. Don’t worry about words, grammar, or style. Just dump it all out and arrange it properly.

What these two strategies have in common is that they make progress without engaging the part of your brain that wants perfection. Everyone knows a list of chapters is not perfect. No one expects a fat outline to be perfect. You can write them to explore sequence and content without triggering your perfectionist tendencies.

Carry that over into the first draft. The purpose of the first draft is to flesh out the fat outline with prose. Write. And don’t worry. The purpose of this writing is to get content out on the page. It will have problems. You’ll fix it later. (Cf. shitty first draft, Anne Lamott.)

Here’s one more trick. When you write something that you know is imperfect, add a comment in track changes that documents your concerns (for example, “Must find a source to back this up” or “Terminology on this varies throughout the chapter, must make consistent.”) Now that you’ve noted the problem, you can ignore it. You’ll fix it later.

If you do this enough times in a row, you’ll have a complete, imperfect manuscript. And you’ll have written it quickly enough that you’ll have plenty of time to revise it.

Experimenting with tone

The other problem that perfectionists have is that what they write doesn’t sound right. It’s too dry. Or too familiar. It’s boring. It’s unhinged. It’s just, somehow, wrong.

That’s a real problem. You don’t want to write a whole book that’s got the tone wrong.

This is a problem worth solving. So solve it. Choose an important part of the book, for example, the part where you explain your main idea.

Write it in 1,000 words.

Write it when you’re angry.

Now write another version when you’re drunk.

Write another version after you’ve taught a class on it and are ready to inspire people.

Go ahead. Write it five times. Each one is an experiment. And it’s no big deal to write 5,000 words in the form of five versions of the same 1,000-word idea.

Do this enough, and you’ll pull together the elements of your tone that matter. It will begin to sound the way you want it to sound. Give yourself two weeks to polish that 1,000-word chunk. It will become a gem shining forth within your manuscript.

The purpose of this tonal exercise is to find out who you are a writer (and specifically, who you are as a writer of this book.)

Once the tone feels right, you can write any portion of the manuscript in a way that feels like it belongs in the book.

So I give you permission to indulge your perfectionist tendencies on this single 1000-word chunk. It will become a model for you, and that’s worth investing in. And it won’t bog you down attempting to get the other 50,000 words perfect the first time you write them.

Let the perfectionist back out in the subsequent drafts

If you follow my suggestions here, you’ll have a complete manuscript along with a shining example of perfect tone. And if you’ve planned properly, you’ll have them many months before the manuscript deadline.

Now go back to the beginning. Knowing everything you’ve learned along the way, now you’re ready to rewrite the book the way it ought to be. That will go quickly and feel awesome. And it’s when you allow your inner perfectionist back out of the closet.

This is when you attempt to create a perfect draft.

That draft is the one that goes to the copy editor, who will help you to perfect it even more.

Once you’ve written a book this way once, your inner perfectionist can be held at bay in future projects. You can promise them they’ll get their chance to make the book perfect — but only after you’ve drafted the whole manuscript and locked into the perfect tone.

That’s how real writers create great, nearly perfect books on a deadline. Not all at once. But in stages that are designed to generate perfection at the end, not at the beginning.