1: Perfectionism Is The Enemy of Any First Draft

Given that this is my first blog post, I am going to open it with some tough love:

If you spend your time trying to make your first draft perfect, you’re never going to finish it.

Does this repetitive cycle look familiar?

• Motivation to start your story hits

• Write the first paragraph, and then re-write the first paragraph to make it sound better, and then re-write the re-written first paragraph to make it sound better again

• Grow frustrated that you have been writing for a month or so now and have only written a couple chapters

• Take a six-month hiatus from writing because writer’s block is hitting hard

• Feel motivated to start writing again

• Revisit the first couple chapters previously written and re-write them again

This is the cycle I was caught in from the age of twelve when the very initial concept of my story first came to me.

Fifteen years later, I realised that although I had some very solid first chapters, I was feeling very discouraged that I kept experiencing this urge to get this story out of me and yet I was no closer to realising that dream.

Perfectionism – Why I Was Experiencing It

I used to wear my perfectionism as a badge of honour, and I used to pride myself on labelling myself as a perfectionist.

After all, I received a lot of external praise and excellent grades when I put in 300% effort, stayed up until the early hours of the morning, burned myself into the ground, and produced stellar assignments in high school and university.

So, it was worth it right?

My perfectionism then started to bleed from my schoolwork into other areas of my life: Controlling eating habits (calorie counting / restrictive eating), incredibly long daily to-do-lists that I HAD to complete, amongst other things.

After doing a lot of mindset work around perfectionism, I realised perfectionism for me was the way my brain tried to create the illusion of safety for me.

And here is the exact transcript (or close enough to) of the inner dialogue of my ego and how it used perfectionism as a safety mechanism for my writing:

“If my book is absolutely perfect then I won’t receive criticism, I won’t fail, I won’t be rejected, I will be in control of how it is received by readers, it will mean I am worthy of being a writer.”

I had to unlearn that safety doesn’t actually exists. And that being “perfect” doesn’t equal safety. In fact, perfectionism was the one thing holding me back from the longest dream I have had in life.

I had created characters, a world, a magic system, and a story that excited me and lit me up, but they never made it past the first 30 pages. In fact, after fifteen years of learning about these characters and this world, they still barely existed outside of my head.

And this was all because on every single page, I had to re-write every single sentence.

Because the main character’s blue eyes couldn’t just sparkle for a first draft… they had to be vivid blue eyes that sparkled… and sparkled didn’t sound sophisticated so they had to be vivid blue eyes that lit up.

When it honestly doesn’t matter this early on how exactly a character’s eyes look when the one task I should have been focusing on at this point in my writing journey was simply to get the story inside of my head out onto the page!

What I Achieved as a Perfectionist in my Writing

So just in case you still might be thinking on the defensive and telling yourself that perfectionism is a really amazing trait that wields great results when it comes to first drafts, let me break down the top four things I managed to achieve while writing my first draft from the mindset of a perfectionist.

1. Re-writing the same seven initial chapters over… and over… and over again

Don’t get me wrong, I was really happy with the first seven chapters I had written. They were full of some excellent descriptions and carried the tone I wanted to emulate in my final draft. However, I never got any further than those same seven chapters in fifteen years because my perfectionism dried up my creativity quicker than an Aussie drought. It’s very hard to stay engaged and motivated to continue writing when you’re not seeing any progress.

A famous quote from Stephen King reads:

Now I definitely can appreciate that Stephen King writes for a living, giving him a little more wriggle room to write a first draft in three months, though putting that aside, the message behind this quote is a first draft shouldn’t be a long drawn-out process. If your first draft takes a hot minute, there was way too much analysis involved – fifteen years of over analysis in my case.

2. Loss of creativity, or ‘writer’s block’

Ugh. Writer’s Block.

Such a horrible feeling being stuck.

It was a tough realisation for me that writer’s block was a self-inflicted experience. Creativity thrives when it is in flow. When it doesn’t feel like it has limits or restrictions.

Every time my creativity wanted to take off and flourish, I was constantly there holding it back like a helicopter parent, chiding it with remarks like, “now, now, we can make this sound much better than what we have written so far, let’s go over this again and again until we have it absolutely perfect.”

Every time I scolded my creativity and held it back from it feeling free to express itself, I slowly felt it retract in on itself more and more until it disappeared completely.

Hello writer’s block.

Hello six-month hiatus from writing.

3. Questioned my self-worth due to comparisonitis

Here I am, writing my first fantasy story ever, and comparing it to the finished Throne of Glass series written by Sarah J Maas (yes, I am a huge fan). It was very hard to look at my writing each and every day, wondering how my writing wasn’t matching up to the amazing storytelling of my favourite authors.

I doubted myself, a lot, and put more pressure on myself to be perfect immediately, completely overlooking the fact that these authors write multiple drafts to get them to publication worthy stories.

Even SJM herself admitted on a livestream that she completely re-wrote the first draft of Crescent City 3 after handing it in to her editor because she felt so “meh” about it.

4. Spent more time worrying about the criticism I could potentially receive than actually writing

And the last notable thing I achieved was I spent more time in my head worrying about the potential criticism I was going to receive on my writing than I actually spent writing. And when you’re more focused on the fear of your story potentially being out in the world, than excited for your story, and your characters you love so dearly, to be out in the world, then the book was never going to be anything more than a thought.

The Four Stages of the Writing Process

I’ve recently learnt that there are four stages in the writing process:

Each stage occurs in isolation, and you can’t move onto the next stage until the stage you are currently on is 100% complete. Please note that the planning element in this table is referring to the initial planning of a story.

I was continuously getting stuck in my first draft as I would consistently be dabbling in more than one stage at once. The most common mistake I would make was doing stage 2 (Drafting) and stage 3/4 (Revising and Editing) at the same time.

I would be writing a chapter for the first time whilst simultaneously continuously revisiting and changing every single sentence I wrote immediately after writing it because I knew there was a better way I could word something. Which I learnt the hard way is the perfect solution if you want to get nowhere and make no forward progress.

When writing a first draft you are in one stage and one stage only:

What Freed my Mind from Needing to be Perfect

I’ve been reading quite a few quotes recently from famous authors surrounding first drafts and the most freeing thing I read that completely shifted my mindset around my first draft is when I realised, first drafts are supposed to be bad. They’re supposed to be utterly terrible. First drafts are raw, unthinking, emotion-driven pieces of work and the moment I try to bring in reason and sense and logic, I am killing the intuitive and creative flow.

I am killing the potential of my story.

Every single author writes a less than average first draft, and it clicked for me that it was foolish of me to think I could bypass this crucial part of the process and do it perfectly on the first go round.

A Tactic to Challenge Perfectionism

The next time you are looking at your first draft on your screen, give this a go.

Do. Not. Edit.

Not a single thing.

If you think the dialogue is bland, it doesn’t matter. Don’t change it. Just keep writing.

If you think your description of a really important setting isn’t capturing the magic or vibrancy you want to get across, it doesn’t matter. Don’t change it. Just keep writing.

The number of times I wanted to edit this blog post because I was concerned about not sounding refined enough, it didn’t matter. I didn’t change it whilst drafting. I just kept writing. And if I let the old perfectionist tendencies within me win, I would revise this post 100 more times before I posted it.

I’m currently sitting at 17,000 words (~14%) into my first draft which is the most I have ever written using this one technique.

Do. Not. Edit.

Just keep writing.

And just in case you’re still sceptical about writing a bad first draft, here are some direct quotes from my own first draft that showcase absolutely terrible writing (in my opinion) that I refuse to change or revisit until I am in the revising stage of the second draft.

“…fuelled by the spilt ale and stray pieces of hay from all the benches made from hay…”

• I said hay twice and that sounds dumb, was a literal thought I had as I was writing this sentence. I still haven’t changed this sentence, and it still exists in my first draft. I just kept writing.

“How interesting.”

“What’s interesting?”

“It lies with you.”

“What lies with me?”

• A very boring dialogue exchange that is as interesting as watching paint dry and yet, this dialogue also still exists in my first draft, and I just kept writing.

The sooner you accept that it doesn’t matter if a sentence doesn’t feel right, or if there is a better adjective that would perfectly capture what you are trying to describe, the sooner you will finish your first draft. All that matters is that you get words onto the page.

Making those words sound like they belong in a professionally published book is a task for a second draft.

Happy Writing,

Renee Ella

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