Writer's Wednesday!!!
A writing professor once gave me a valuable bit of advice to thwart my perfectionist tendencies.
"Good writing is never finished. It's just abandoned."
No matter how many revisions/drafts you have gone through, there will always be something to change or fix. If you really want to drive yourself nuts, have three people offer critiques and try to please everyone. You'll go back and forth so many times, you'll completely forget what the original inspiration was.
I'm reminded of my very brief stint selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door. Part of the demonstration involved vacuuming an area of someone's home with the new vacuum after already going over the area with the old one. New vacuum will always show filth not picked up by old vacuum. Reverse the process... and you get the same result. Any vacuum can follow behind another and pick up something that was overlooked.
So, don't wait until the work is bulletproof. It will never be. No matter how good something is, I promise you at least one out of five people will hate it. (Getting comfortable with rejection deserves its own post.)
If the perfect novel, song, advertisement, package instructions, or article existed, we wouldn't need any others. That doesn't mean I suggest trying to sell your first draft. But, if you start getting into the double-digits on rewrites, you may want to leave it alone.
Let the work speak for itself. And trust your instincts. If something intangible tells you to burn all traces of what you've been working on for months, do it. The wrong thing can be written well.
Showing posts with label perfectionist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label perfectionist. Show all posts
21 December, 2011
28 September, 2011
Perfectionist's Guide to Poor Writing
Writers' Wednesday!
If you've heard it once, you've heard it a million times: throw up, then clean up.
As a perfectionist, this is easier said than done. I want to control the angle, distance, splash pattern, contents, colors, smells... you get the idea.
The reason for throwing up is that edit-as-you-go is a complete waste of time. Until you have finished whatever you're writing (a limerick, protest sign, tweet, treatise on wolf calls, or great American novel) all that precious editing you've done will have to be redone anyway. Again, and again, and again. You can literally waste weeks perfecting some scene that will end up being deleted after the end when even you'll agree it doesn't belong. The more time you wasted perfecting it will make it that much harder to get rid of when it has to go.
Now for the big question: If you're a perfectionist one parallel positioning of the three-hole punch away from full-blown OCD, how will you ever manage to move on from one word to the next without electroshock therapy?
Candy.
I speak of candy in the general sense. Could be cookies. Could be fruit. Could be dark chocolate covered peanut butter caramels... for example. Just be sure it has sugar and you give it to yourself after you've blasted through a mess of everything that rhymes with Nantucket but before you write about the man and his bucket.
It's not just the idea of the rewarding small steps that helps you forego editing for now. The mind on sugar is as forgiving as Docker's pants with the little elastic parts by the belt loops. And if you can caffeinate it... Bingo!! (thank you, Diet Dr. Pepper!) I once knocked out a ten-pager on A Brave New World in five hours (including the time it took to "read" the last half of the book) all hopped up on No Doze, Mike&Ike, and a few soft drink cans. I turned it in knowing my road to fame and fortune had just been paved on the most brilliant Huxley analysis ever!
Edit sober. I repeat. Edit when you are sober. It's okay to stop mid-sentence and then proceed to rewrite the sentence without ever grazing the backspace key on a first draft. But, those kinds of things need to be caught at least by the fourth draft. And certainly before you think it's done.
Lemme take this time to advise that you write responsibly. I am not trying to boost sales of insulin. What I am saying is that if you (like me) are incapable of reigning in your perfectionist urges, find a way to motivate yourself to move on and find something that helps your mind not realize it just repeated the same word several times and managed to spell it differently every time.
What about you? Are you a perfectionist? How do you cope? (And don't tell me you edit as you go. That is just not an option.)
If you've heard it once, you've heard it a million times: throw up, then clean up.
As a perfectionist, this is easier said than done. I want to control the angle, distance, splash pattern, contents, colors, smells... you get the idea.
The reason for throwing up is that edit-as-you-go is a complete waste of time. Until you have finished whatever you're writing (a limerick, protest sign, tweet, treatise on wolf calls, or great American novel) all that precious editing you've done will have to be redone anyway. Again, and again, and again. You can literally waste weeks perfecting some scene that will end up being deleted after the end when even you'll agree it doesn't belong. The more time you wasted perfecting it will make it that much harder to get rid of when it has to go.
Now for the big question: If you're a perfectionist one parallel positioning of the three-hole punch away from full-blown OCD, how will you ever manage to move on from one word to the next without electroshock therapy?
Candy.
I speak of candy in the general sense. Could be cookies. Could be fruit. Could be dark chocolate covered peanut butter caramels... for example. Just be sure it has sugar and you give it to yourself after you've blasted through a mess of everything that rhymes with Nantucket but before you write about the man and his bucket.
It's not just the idea of the rewarding small steps that helps you forego editing for now. The mind on sugar is as forgiving as Docker's pants with the little elastic parts by the belt loops. And if you can caffeinate it... Bingo!! (thank you, Diet Dr. Pepper!) I once knocked out a ten-pager on A Brave New World in five hours (including the time it took to "read" the last half of the book) all hopped up on No Doze, Mike&Ike, and a few soft drink cans. I turned it in knowing my road to fame and fortune had just been paved on the most brilliant Huxley analysis ever!
Edit sober. I repeat. Edit when you are sober. It's okay to stop mid-sentence and then proceed to rewrite the sentence without ever grazing the backspace key on a first draft. But, those kinds of things need to be caught at least by the fourth draft. And certainly before you think it's done.
Lemme take this time to advise that you write responsibly. I am not trying to boost sales of insulin. What I am saying is that if you (like me) are incapable of reigning in your perfectionist urges, find a way to motivate yourself to move on and find something that helps your mind not realize it just repeated the same word several times and managed to spell it differently every time.
What about you? Are you a perfectionist? How do you cope? (And don't tell me you edit as you go. That is just not an option.)
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