Note from the Editor: The following post is taken from Writer’s Time: Management That Works. This program functions with an open enrollment. Registrations are being accepted now. It may seem unusual in a program called Writer’s Time: Management that Works to include a module labeled Conquering Perfectionism, but it isn’t. If you want to write your […]

Note from the Editor: The following post is taken from Writer’s Time: Management That Works. This program functions with an open enrollment. Registrations are being accepted now.

It may seem unusual in a program called Writer’s Time: Management that Works to include a module labeled Conquering Perfectionism, but it isn’t. If you want to write your memoir, you will need to conquer perfectionism.

Perfectionism is a big waste of time.

If you want to write your memoir, you will need to conquer perfectionism.

Conquer perfectionism and become a published writer

If you want to become more effective at time management as a writer, you must heal any perfectionism that is plaguing you.

Perfectionism is a straight and wide highway to failure, to the ever-postponed completion of your memoir. Perfectionism is not likely to lead you to ever having a memoir in hand.

Perfectionism is a sneaky vice. It purports to be a virtue— such as in “I’m not going to slap my memoir together.” We will see how it constitutes an approach to your work that is deadly both for how much you can produce in a period of time (time management) and your satisfaction with your work (and people who are dissatisfied with their writing will quickly have a time management problem).

Writers who have made their peace with perfectionism are called published writers. Writers who have not are called “wannabes” and “writers in progress.

There is no such thing as “perfect.”

“Perfect” is an idealized form of an abstraction you have for your memoir. An ideal is like the horizon which, as you go towards it, continually recedes. On a physical plane, the horizon cannot be reached. On an intellectual plane, neither can an ideal.

No work of art ever achieves the level of the idealized form the creator had imagined for it. It just never does. As Paul Verlaine, the French poet, wrote of poetry, “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” The secret, of course, is to abandon your memoir at an appropriate level of development.

Your text, however well-honed and professionally written, will still be amenable to some revisions—perhaps forever. That is just the way it is. Every text can be altered. You can substitute house for home and then home for house until (as Bill Clinton used to say) “the cows come home.” (Or was that come to the house?)

Too many writers pursue perfectionism—and waste their time! If you keep in mind the image of the horizon as ever receding, you have a great analogy for the waste of time that is perfectionism searching for the ideal.

How perfectionism shows up in your writing

• You put off writing until you have done all the right research. Your research must be “perfect.”

• Antidote: after preliminary research to get grounded in your story, do just-in-time research as you need to anchor your story. What year did your hometown celebrate its bicentennial? For the moment, place an XXXX where the date will be and continue to write. Don’t let research substitute for or interfere with writing.
• Being proud of standards. All the high standards in the world will not produce your book if you do not write.
• Antidote: focus on the theme of your memoir and on how it is important to get your message out to its audience. Do not focus on getting it just right.

The irony of perfectionism is the need to be perfect and it creates paralysis in so many people that it assures continuing imperfection.

Perfectionism is a time management problem that shows its face in many different forms.  The Writer’s Time: Management That Works Program provides antidotes and action steps for each form of perfectionist habit to help you finally write your memoir.