I’m not really a perfectionist. I’m a jack of all trades and master of some, but I don’t care about perfection. In some sense, I consider it a part of the artistic process for a work to have imperfections – we’ll get back to this, it’s crucial. And so, writing perfectionism is something I reject.
But it wasn’t always like that.
I used to spend hours on a single paragraph; whole nights on trying to figure out – in vain – what the perfect chapter would look like.
But then years passed, life happened, and I became more experienced. I also became more skillful, to be sure, but realizing the harms of writing perfectionism is about experience, not skill.
In this post I’ll try to offer some of this experience and show you how writing perfectionism kills your creativity and harms your work. To be a perfectionist writer is to assign quantitative aspects to an inherently qualitative endeavor. Or, in plain English, a perfect answer can only exist for questions like “How much is 5+5?” and not for “Should my antagonist be more subtle?”
Writing as art involves affect, not perfection. In other words, it’s precisely imperfection that gives meaning, affect, and ultimately value to the work.
