Making Things Perfect vs Putting Them Out Into the World
So as many of you know, I am a writer. I get paid for the advertising portion of that, but the rest is for pure pleasure--blogging most recently, and longer-term and ongoing, stories and book-length projects, both fiction and non-fiction.
I’m good at making time to write, but terrible about trying to get things out into the world, actually trying to publish pieces. I’m trying to change that (see my New Year’s resolutions), but I’ve been thinking lately about WHY it is that I’m so terrible about that part of the process.
I read an article in the New Yorker over the weekend by Tina Fey, and something she said has stuck with me:
“…it’s a great lesson in not being too precious about your writing. You have to try your hardest to be at the top of your game…but then you have to let it go. You can’t be that kid standing at the top of the waterslide, overthinking it. You have to go down the chute…You have to let people see what you wrote. It will never be perfect, but perfect is overrated. Perfect is boring…”
Maybe this is part/all of my problem: I feel like everything has to be perfect. I don’t know when to let go. My standards are so high, I think it paralyzes me.
Forcing myself to send something out once a month is, I think, a step in the right direction. But I wonder: is there a way to get over that feeling that I’m being judged and that I’m bad if I send something out that’s not perfect? Is it stifling my creativity? Or is it being rash and sloppy to send something out before revising it 100 times?
I want things to flow more freely. This fear that I’m bad if something I send out isn’t perfect has got to go. Maybe I can just experiment with not trying to be perfect? See what happens? Just writing those words feels freeing and fun…
Image credit: Emily Carlin.
