NaNoWriMo and the Battle Against Perfectionism

I spent a lot of time this November, while in the throes of NaNoWriMo, thinking about perfectionism, specifically the relationship between my perfectionism and my writing.

According to dictionary.com, “perfectionism” as a word dates back to the 1830s-40s and refers to “a personal standard, attitude, or philosophy that demands perfection and rejects anything less.” That seems fairly innocuous, almost positive, but my relationship with perfectionism is one I would characterize as negative. I’ve touched briefly on this in my post about the Have Done List, but I’d like to dig deeper.

I am, and have always been, a perfectionist. I don’t think that I will ever not, deep down in my soul, be a perfectionist. I think a lot of people misconstrue what perfectionism is. When they think of a perfectionist, they think of someone who presents a highly polished exterior, whose house is immaculate, whose finished projects shine without visible default. I am not this type of perfectionist (and I’d argue that that person is not in fact a perfectionist). My clothes are almost always rumpled because it takes me half an hour to iron a shirt because it must be creaseless or else why bother. My house is, at best of times, organized chaos and, at worst, a complete disaster because I get so overwhelmed by the need to clean to spotlessness that I just don’t do it (fortunately I’ve learned to break house cleaning into smaller tasks that can be spread out over time, so it’s not a health risk). And I have so many half-finished projects lying around the place because I inevitably reach a point in them where I realize that they’re not going to turn out the way I want them to and I get so anxious at the idea of presenting something that isn’t representative of my best that I just stop. I give up.

My perfectionism is the voice in my head telling me “it’s not going to be perfect, so why bother.” It doesn’t allow room for experimentation or process or growth. It demands the best I can give or nothing. It’s the part of me that’s afraid to try new things because what if I do them incorrectly (which I will)? My perfectionism disregards the learning process, focusing solely on results.

There are some up sides to perfectionism, of course, but for my purposes today, I’d like to focus on the negative aspects and how it has affected my ability to write.

When I first sat down to seriously attempt writing a novel, I was eleven or twelve years old and fully at the mercy of my perfectionism. I didn’t understand that it was a bad thing, I thought it made me superior to my classmates as it enabled me to compose an entire essay in my head prior to sitting down to write it (I was a very snobbish preteen). I thought that ability would help me write a novel, but it is much more difficult to hold an entire novel outline in your head than a five-paragraph essay. I never got past page seventy-five of that novel. Every time I sat down to write, I’d start at the beginning of the document. I’d revise and revise the first chapter, polishing it to perfection and only when it was perfect could I move on to chapter two.

I eventually abandoned that project as no good, too derivative of Tamora Pierce’s work (my favorite author at the time), too childish (because gee, I was a child). I moved on to other stories. I created extensive outlines for projects that I was too afraid to write, knowing I’d never be able to achieve the vision laid out in my mind, knowing I wasn’t good enough. I started several other projects and completed none of them.

It wasn’t until I read Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott for my twelfth-grade summer reading that I learned that the first draft isn’t meant to be perfect. That was such a freeing moment of realization, reading her chapter on “the shitty first draft”. Before, I had a vague notion of multiple drafts and doing revisions, but I’d always thought that those were supposed to be on a surface level, fixing mechanical errors and wordsmithing. I’d never known that you could throw out entire storylines that weren’t working or eliminate characters that weren’t serving a function. I didn’t know how brutal and structure-altering revision could be. Until that point, I was trying to make my first draft my final draft, something that just isn’t possible to do at a novel-length, at least not for me.

But even with that realization, I still struggled to finish anything. Granted I was also in my senior year of high school, applying for colleges, taking a full range of Honors and AP courses and struggling with Lyme Disease. There wasn’t much time to do anything beyond sleep and do my school work and take my doxycycline which made me feel awful in a different way than the Lyme. I still wrote, but it was only the beginnings of things (including the first seed of the novel I completed this year for NaNo). It wasn’t until I had my first big life failure (being forced to leave college because of a lingering viral infection) that I was finally able to sit down and finish a novel from start to end. I’d already failed, publically, humiliatingly failed, so why not fail privately, on the pages of a decomposition notebook where no one could see?

That first novel was terrible. But I finished it and it was so freeing because I learned that I could in fact survive failure. I’d failed and I’d had fun doing it. Failure was better than never trying.

That first finished mess of a novel will never see the light of day. I’ve cannibalized parts of it for other novels, including the one I’ve queried, but it will never move beyond the pages of the six composition notebooks I wrote it in. But letting go of my perfectionism, letting myself write something that I knew was going to be a disaster, was the most liberating experience of my writing journey to date. Because while I’ve always known that I can write and that I can write well, I needed to learn that I could write badly and that it wouldn’t be the end of the world.

Because that’s what perfectionism does when linked to anxiety, it tells me that if I make a mistake, I will be judged. If my eyeliner isn’t perfect, someone will see that mistake and they will deem me unworthy of eyeliner. If I make a typo, I will be deemed an illiterate. If I write a book that is anything short of Hugo-worthy, then I have wasted my time. I know logically, that these thoughts are ridiculous. They are a product of anxiety. But knowing what they are, doesn’t stop them from cropping up every time I sit down to start a new project.

And that’s why I find NaNoWriMo and other month-long challenges like my September Submission Challenge so important. They allow for my competitive nature to override my perfectionism. Either that, or they pit two aspects of my perfectionism against each other: the side that wants to achieve 50,000 words or more (I will always be an over achiever) versus the side that wants to write a masterpiece. Masterpieces don’t “win” NaNoWriMo and I want to win.

So, I’ve had to train myself to write without perfectionism, to ignore typos, to put editorial comments in brackets rather than pausing to fix all the mistakes I see, to write through the bits I don’t know, to trust my future self to be able to fix the mistakes I see myself making. It’s hard. I don’t know if I can articulate how hard it is to be at war with yourself while trying to be fully engaged in writing a novel that will be immersive and engaging in its own right, but I’ve learned to do it somehow and I get better at it all the time.

When I write by hand, I’ve learned to write in pen rather than a pencil so I can’t erase. I set myself quantitative goals (like 30 submissions in 30 days) so that I don’t get too caught up in quality. I separate my worth as a writer from the quality of a writer by telling myself that just because this thing is bad, doesn’t mean that I am bad. And it mostly works. There are still days where I’m paralyzed by perfectionism, where I sit immobilized because can’t start the scene until I know exactly how it’s going to play out beat-for-beat, and that’s okay. I’m not going to be perfect in overcoming my perfectionism.

Anyway, what brought on all this thinking about perfectionism, was a comment someone posted on a Facebook post I made when I passed 50,000 words this month. They asked if they were well-thought-out words. I’ve thought about whether or not to write about this, because I know that this person reads my blog. I know that they didn’t have any malicious intent in asking that question. I know that they don’t know about my long-standing struggling with perfectionism and the small traumas I carry with me as a result. I believe they were coming from a place of mentorship though they themselves are not a writer. But the fact remains that that comment opened up old wounds. It was like my perfectionism given voice, like all the hard work I’d done to escape that need for quality above all else was for an instant thrown away and I was that eleven-year-old girl again, rewriting chapter one for the umpteenth time, never finishing.

But then the moment passed and I was able to appreciate how far I’ve come. In the past nine years, since I finished that first imperfect novel, I’ve written four more imperfect novels and twenty-three imperfect short stories, three of which have been published. I’ve tried things I never would have thought myself capable of (such as even writing a short story) and I’ve become a better writer by learning to write badly. Because only by making mistakes are we able to learn from them.

Thank you for reading!