When every word has to be perfect, what’s our main instinct? Is it to start early, draft and draft again, ask numerous others for feedback, and revel in the chance to revise? Or is it to procrastinate, fret, give up again and again, and ultimately feel unsettled with whatever we produce?
For most of us, our best aspirations push us toward the former, but the reality looks more like the latter. But why is this the case? Surely our conscious minds know being “perfect” takes extra time and effort. Yet our behaviors too often do the opposite. Let’s explore some possible sources of stress when doing high stakes writing.
The first source I’d like to consider is our desire to play to win, or not play at all. Here’s an example. Let’s say I ask you a trivia question that you cannot possibly answer correctly using any information you know. “How many cargo ships currently sailing have a total ballast greater than 10 tons?” How would you even begin to guess? Why would you even begin to guess? Getting the answer right is random chance, and it’s almost certain your answer will be wrong, perhaps by an order of magnitude or more.
What do most of us do in this situation? Either we throw out a random number, or we say, “I have no idea” and refuse to guess. We’d rather not play when we know we can’t win.
The same thing causes stress when our writing must live up to an impossible standard. Even knowing how important the writing is, we procrastinate because we fear no matter what we do, we’ll be wrong. Why should we be forced to live by rules of perfection when our failure is all but guaranteed? We’d rather not write at all if our writing must be perfect.
The second source is a belief that perfect writing is possible. Think about those transcendent passages of prose or poetry you’ve read, the ones that you read again and again and continue to marvel in their construction. Or think about something more mundane—a perfectly crafted email that lays out steps to take and their rationale, clear and concise. We have all seen writing that does exactly what it needs to do, and that means we know the standard we have to live up to.
When we hold ourselves against a standard—no matter how unrealistic—we start doing some upward comparison: We look to the best and think, “That’s not me.” The result is we start to question our abilities. “If I can’t do that, then maybe I’m not cut out for writing.” Why should we be the ones writing if we can’t do it as well as others? But we have to write in so many situations, and this tension causes stress over perfectionism.
And these two sources are closely related. We don’t want to be wrong in our writing, yet we know some people get it right. If that’s not us, then we can’t help but be wrong, making us look worse by comparison.
So what do we do? Continue to suffer? Give up on writing altogether? There must be some work we can do where writing isn’t necessary… That coffee shop down the street seems to always be hiring! In my next post, I’ll explore some ways to address the sources of stress over perfectionism. There IS an answer, and you can put perfectionism aside to write better and faster than you ever have before.
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