Perfection is the enemy of progress

What I've learned... the hard way

If you think your first draft is rubbish, good

You know that moment when you look at what you’ve just written and think, “Well, that’s a steaming pile of nothing”? Yeah. That’s the moment you’re doing it right. If you’ve never cringed at your own first draft and considered deleting your entire Google Drive, are you even writing?

There’s this ridiculous expectation floating around that the words should tumble out of you like poetry, perfect and poised, ready for print. As if you’re supposed to channel some divine muse, barefoot in a candlelit room, churning out Booker Prize material between herbal teas. No. It’s not like that. It’s never been like that. Most of the time, it’s you, a keyboard, three tabs open to “how to spell definitely”, and a mild existential crisis.

The perfection trap (and yes, it is a trap)

I’ve worked with so many writers who get tangled in the perfection trap, and I say “trap” because that’s exactly what it is. One client rewrote the first chapter twenty-three times. Twenty-three. Eventually I had to ask, “How’s chapter two looking?” and she looked like I’d just asked her to perform open-heart surgery on a squirrel. She was stuck. Convinced she had to get the beginning right before she could move on. As if a book only counts if it’s perfect from the first line. Spoiler: it doesn’t.

There is no right way to write a book. There is only your way. And that usually involves coffee, swearing, self-doubt, and stubbornness in equal measure.

Fear dressed up as ‘standards’

Perfection is sneaky. It pretends to be ambition, or standards, or professionalism, but mostly, it’s fear with lipstick on. We faff about with fonts, obsess over word choices, adjust margins by half a millimetre, and convince ourselves it’s productive. I once spent an entire weekend trying to choose between two subtitle fonts. Fonts. For the subtitle. Of a workbook. Guess which one I picked? The one I’d originally had. After forty-eight hours of pure nonsense and a strong urge to set my laptop on fire.

Done is better than perfect

Here’s the thing I’ve learned (the hard way): finished is better than perfect. Always. Because once it’s finished, you can do something with it. You can edit, trim, move things about, get feedback and and shape it into something beautiful. But you can’t shape something that doesn’t exist yet. And you definitely can’t publish a blinking cursor.

Progress is messy; it' has typos, it sounds clunky, it repeats itself, but it’s still progress. And you don’t need to be a genius or a perfectionist or someone who alphabetises their spice rack to finish a book (guilty as charged, your Honour). You just need to keep going even when it feels like wading through literary porridge.

Your reader doesn’t care about your margins

Do you know what readers care about? The story. The message. The way it made them feel. Not whether your margins are set to 2.5cm or 3. Not whether you used curly quotation marks or straight ones (yes, someone once asked me that. They are now banned from asking questions).

So if you’re stuck in that loop of rereading, rewriting, redoing the same paragraph for the seventeenth time, here’s your permission slip: let it be imperfect. Write the dodgy first draft. Let it be weird and messy and human. You can fix it later. But only if it exists.

Let them have your words

Your words matter more than your worries. Get them out there. Someone is waiting to read what only you can write, and I promise, not a single one of them is going to say, “Loved the message, but the kerning could have been tighter.”

J.x