Aiming for perfection in writing
and falling well short
I remember when I used to think, “man, I can’t share this article I just wrote to social media, people will criticize me, they’ll think I’m just another aspiring person chasing something stupid, or they’ll laugh”.
People did none of those things, really. I was told to just start posting my writing to social media because you never know who will see it or share it. I was also told that you’re always going to have people that criticize your stuff. It’s okay and frankly, it’s part of life.
I mean, I’ve always been a fairly confident person, but being vulnerable to an audience of a ton, or an audience of none, still counts as being vulnerable.
I’ve seen a lot of writers here on Medium say that the posts they write that become the most popular, are the ones that they never thought would leave the ground. They also add that some of the posts they put the most time and effort into see 3 sets of eyeballs and never emerge as anything special.
If this is the case, why is everyone worried about their post being perfect before publishing or sharing? My posts have been roughly the same pattern. The posts that I felt weren’t my best writing got more attention than some that I worked harder on, did research for, and cared about more.
If perfection is what you’re aiming for, you won’t reach it. You may put together an amazing piece about studies showing a reliable chance of unicorns being real. Maybe even a few people have spotted them. You reference all the reputable sites and you execute an accurate flow of information. All of this is capped off by a great conclusion.
It doesn’t matter if nobody wants to read about the possibility of unicorns being real, though. Side note — that actually would be a really intriguing read to me, so maybe that’s a bad example. Point is, you could miss one word in the headline that would otherwise grab a bunch more views, but instead no one is reading your stuff because you didn’t throw enough “power” words in there, whatever that means.
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, right? Perfection is subjective. Who decides what a perfect piece of writing really is? Your mom? Probably not. She’s most likely biased and will like most things you put your time and effort into. Yourself? No. You struggle with needing perfection and also criticize your own writing more than anyone, remember?
If you can’t crawl out of the “needing it to be perfect” hole, you won’t succeed. I’ve said it in numerous other pieces of writing — you can’t be afraid to fail. Piggy-backing off of that, you can’t be constantly in search of perfection before you publish a piece. Some would say that only when you begin putting more and more work out there for more people to see, will perfection rear it’s head.
I think some writers put so much pressure on a piece that they fall into a paralysis. They aren’t publishing things, which means they aren’t becoming a better writer, because they are busy tinkering with where they need to put an extra comma or another adjective. Without pushing through that need to constantly edit, correct, and improve the piece, writers sit there critiquing and trying to get right what most people won’t even see as a flaw.
Before I hit publish I do a few things. I read through my entire piece a couple of times and make a few changes that I personally deem necessary to further clarify my writing. I then add tags to the post and I throw in a couple pictures to give readers a break throughout all the wonderful literature.
Most of the time I don’t even think twice about publishing the piece. I know that it is conveying what my thoughts were on the particular subject. I also know that there is a reason I put in the time to write out those thoughts, think critically on them, and put them in a draft.
If I didn’t care about writing I wouldn’t put things into words. If I didn’t put things into words on paper, nobody would ever see my thoughts. It just so happens that I enjoy giving input into some things that I care about. On the surface, this post is about writing, sure. However, I believe there are things rooted here that can be contributed to other parts of life.
That’s why I keep writing without perfection.
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