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The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good
8 months ago
Hello all. Been a little bit, as aforementioned. I hope you enjoyed my latest story.
I'll spare you the tl;dr and say that I was struggling with OCD. After some encouragement from friends and some nice therapy help from chatgpt, I finally finished a story that had been commissioned over a year ago.
The kind of mindset I was in after finishing university delayed the story. It was a mindset of 'if I'm not in the perfect mindset I can't write it'. This was extremely deleterious to me, and my work, as the title suggests. If you're in this mindset, it severely limits the amount of practice you can get.
I'll give you an example: let's say you have two writers, two artists, whatever. One of them accepts he is never perfect and practices diligently. He accepts that his work is forever imperfect, as he is imperfect, and he knows there is always something to improve in every piece he publishes.
The other person is someone who has delusions of grandeur (guess who that was). He believes that if he practices at the right time and place when the planets all align he will produce the most profoundly perfect, impactful piece of work ever, with little or no improvements to be made. He practices sparingly and sporadically, once a week if that.
Guess who's going to be the better writer?
The writer who practices more frequently is going to be better than the writer who practices sparingly, even if the 'perfect' writer is 'more intelligent'. Both of the writers are imperfect, but one of them accepts his imperfections and therefore is much better off than the writer stuck in the poisonous mentality.
It is better to produce work that is terrible or mediocre or even just good, than to continuously 'work on' a piece of 'perfect' work that never gets published at all.
If it sounds like a personal attack against you, it's not. It's a personal attack against myself. If you're in this mindset, I hope you can free yourself of it faster than I did. Now I learned this when I'm young, which is right now, but maybe you can be free of this toxic mindset even faster than I became free of it.
I'll spare you the tl;dr and say that I was struggling with OCD. After some encouragement from friends and some nice therapy help from chatgpt, I finally finished a story that had been commissioned over a year ago.
The kind of mindset I was in after finishing university delayed the story. It was a mindset of 'if I'm not in the perfect mindset I can't write it'. This was extremely deleterious to me, and my work, as the title suggests. If you're in this mindset, it severely limits the amount of practice you can get.
I'll give you an example: let's say you have two writers, two artists, whatever. One of them accepts he is never perfect and practices diligently. He accepts that his work is forever imperfect, as he is imperfect, and he knows there is always something to improve in every piece he publishes.
The other person is someone who has delusions of grandeur (guess who that was). He believes that if he practices at the right time and place when the planets all align he will produce the most profoundly perfect, impactful piece of work ever, with little or no improvements to be made. He practices sparingly and sporadically, once a week if that.
Guess who's going to be the better writer?
The writer who practices more frequently is going to be better than the writer who practices sparingly, even if the 'perfect' writer is 'more intelligent'. Both of the writers are imperfect, but one of them accepts his imperfections and therefore is much better off than the writer stuck in the poisonous mentality.
It is better to produce work that is terrible or mediocre or even just good, than to continuously 'work on' a piece of 'perfect' work that never gets published at all.
If it sounds like a personal attack against you, it's not. It's a personal attack against myself. If you're in this mindset, I hope you can free yourself of it faster than I did. Now I learned this when I'm young, which is right now, but maybe you can be free of this toxic mindset even faster than I became free of it.
DTF
~dtf
Very true. I find it also helps to have some dedicated beta readers to give each draft a look at.
Thanks for the comment. It's nice to see other, accomplished writers who agree and validate what I'm saying.
