Overcoming perfectionism
I’m thrilled to report that I have had a wonderful writing week.
I’m now over the 40k mark on my third novel and am enjoying myself immensely - this book is proving to be a joyful experience thus far - and long may that continue. Part of the reason I think I am having such a great time writing it, is that I have (at least for the moment) let go of the need for it to be perfect, a need that hung heavy around the writing of my second novel and made the experience fraught with expectation and emotion.
The week started off with two days away with fellow writer Clare Leslie Hall, the author of the absolute runaway bestseller, and Reese's Book Club pick, Broken Country. If you haven’t read this novel yet and you are in the market for an epic love story combined with a thrilling whodunnit, then I cannot recommend it enough (Clare’s own story of how her huge success came to be is so inspiring, and I am thinking of asking her to do a guest post on here, let me know if that’s something you’d be interested in reading).
Clare is one of my favourite writing friends and we decided a while ago that we would treat ourselves to a mini writing retreat this summer, where we would combine writing with our other favourite things; chatting, eating and spa-ing (I can highly recommend this combination of activities), and one of our main conversations during the ‘chatting’ portion of the trip was about the topic of perfectionism as a writer. It got me thinking about the strategies I now have in place to help me to get out of my own way, which both Clare and I agreed is probably our biggest writing challenge, so I thought I would share them here, as it’s a while since I did an exclusively writing focused post.
The first thing to say is that these are all really simple, practical things that don’t require any deep-rooted analysis of the reasons for my need for perfection and overly high expectations of myself. I’ve spent enough on therapy to understand what those are. The trick now is to not let them stop me doing the thing I most want to do; write and publish my writing.
If you feel stuck, maybe some of these will help you too, but as always with any writing advice, take what’s useful and ignore the rest.
1. Tell yourself no-one ever has to read it.
This was the only way that The Barbecue at No.9 got written. I got myself so up in my head about how ‘perfect’ my second novel was going to have to be, that I found it almost impossible to write at all.
