Why Aiming for Perfection Can Kill Your Writing
How to get your creative mojo back
Many people suffer from a need for personal perfection. While striving for greatness is to be applauded, aiming to produce flawless writing can be a drawback that stops creativity from flowing and dampens your mojo. Embrace free writing when you pen first drafts and edit alter. Only then will your writer’s voice land on the page.
If you’re a seasoned writer, you might have noticed your older work — you know, the embarrassing stuff you keep hidden these days — has a redeeming quality. Back then, before you knew about sentence structure and grammar, you weren’t afraid to let rip on the page with your pen or allow your fingertips to fly over your keyboard with gusto.
Because you weren’t scared of making mistakes — primarily, as you weren’t aware of the many errors you could produce — you were free. Unhampered by the need to make words perfect, you let them flow like a river. And your confidence showed.
Measure your prose against what you write now, and yes, you’ll be aghast about grammatical gaffes and repetitions. Still, you will miss the innocent version of you before who simply enjoyed writing rather than trying to get it all right.
I’ve abandoned strategies, those I used previously to make my writing as perfect as possible, and as a result, may not always produce polished literary treasures. But my words gush again. They are no longer held by closed floodgates to protect the unmarked screen or page from errors. Here’s how I got back my writing mojo. If you’re stuck, you might want to try too.
Write as you think
When you think too hard before making your mark, something dies. That vital spark that delights goes out and is replaced by dull grayness. Thinking is the enemy of the first draft, robbing you of your talent.
Rather than think, then write, do the opposite. Write, then think. You can always go over your work and ditch mistakes later. For now, just write as the words flow in your head.
Don’t go over what you’ve written yet…
I used to type a line or two, and out of the corner of my eye, see Word’s automatic spellcheck highlight the odd gaffe here and there. I’d stop mid-sentence and backtrack. I hated knowing I’d made mistakes and wouldn’t continue until I corrected them.
Now, I still spy a few mistakes as I write. But I ignore them. Sometimes I even feel good about them. Leaving them, for now, means I’m courageously letting my creativity flow. And I like to know that’s happening even more than I like correcting clangers.
Free flow
Free flowing’s fun. It feels like standing in the wind and allowing it to mess with your hair and not caring. I was always told you must have a plan before you write. You should structure your essays and articles with a beginning, middle, and end. Well, guess what? Beginnings, middles, and ends happen naturally if you give them leeway. When over-structured, they read like instruction pamphlets.
Forget what you’ve been taught
As well as the standard layout for writing, at school, you were probably taught endings were to be mere repetitions, worded differently, maybe, of what you’d already produced. No doubt, you didn’t inquire why. If you had, a well-meaning teacher might have told you, “it wraps up the article nicely.”
When someone talks to you, though, they don’t repeat what they’ve said as though you’re dim-witted. They don’t need to because you heard them the first time. The same is true with writing. You can just stop writing when you’ve finished saying anything valuable. There’s no need to wrap it up and tie it with a ribbon.
I discovered my writing mojo hidden beneath my spellchecker and perfection-seeking brain. If your spark is missing, perhaps that’s where she lurks too.
Bridget Webber writes articles for magazines and websites; she often ghostwrites for professionals who can’t spare the time to pen compositions. She’s written poetry eBooks and is featured in several leading publications.
