Today on the blog, speculative fiction author and editor at Metastellar Magazine, E. S. Foster provides invaluable advice about battling perfectionism while crafting a story.

3 Ways to Battle Perfectionism as a Writer

Perfectionism is a major obstacle that writers can face. It gets in the way of being able to write more, and it sends negative thoughts of self-doubt into the writer's head. Ultimately, it keeps the writer (and their writing) from reaching their full potential. But how do you battle perfectionism and focus on your writing instead? First, let's look at what you're writing.

Here are three major ways you can overcome perfectionism with your writing.

Make the Rough Draft Rough

The first step to get your perfectionism out of the way is to allow your writing to be imperfect. There's no better place to allow yourself to write badly than the rough draft, because this is when your writing is supposed to be bad.

Why? Because this is where you get all your ideas onto paper. By the time you begin this draft, all of your current ideas aren't fully developed, and you shouldn't expect them to be. When you begin writing, you're very likely to go in a different direction than what you originally intended, so you'll need to go back and make edits and revisions, no matter how careful you are. For example, Ernest Hemingway racked up a total of 39 drafts of Farewell to Arms before it was completed. He didn't let perfectionism get in the way; rather, he went through the writing process again and again because his ideas had yet to fully develop.

So when you begin your rough draft, remember the following:

1. You don't know everything about your characters (but you will)

2. You don't know everything about your world (but you will)

3. You don't know everything about your plot (even if you have an outline)

Since all three facets of your story are only in development, your writing reflects this. If you're going to rewrite and edit later on, as per the writing process, then it does you no good to try to perfect every word. So allow yourself to write a sentence or paragraph that you're not thrilled with. It will all come together when you go back to make changes.

Understand What Skills You Struggle With

However, your perfectionism might not come from your writing process. It might come from the struggles you face when you put words on the page.

A book is a combination of many things: imagery, description, characterization, worldbuilding, and more. Well-known and popular writers might be excellent at some of these things and rotten at others, but they play to their strengths. And compare an author's first book with their latest. Chances are, you'll see how their writing evolved and only got better as they better grasped the skills of writing. You will spend your entire life learning how to write well, so don't beat yourself up if you haven't mastered a certain technique yet.

So take the time to understand what you struggle with, and write down your biggest issues. Tackle those first and continually enhance your skills. To help you out, here is a list of things needed for a good story:

1. Strong imagery

2. Tight narration

3. Unique characters

4. Deep worldbuilding

5. Poetic Prose

Take a Break

Lastly, your writing skills will not suddenly develop overnight. Take your perfectionism down a notch by, most importantly, taking a break when you need one. As I said before, you have your entire life to develop your writing skills. Before things get too overwhelming as you work on those skills, take a step back and reset.

Additionally, the book you're writing won't magically appear on your computer one day. A book is the culmination of many long days and nights, a mountain of effort over a long period of time. Many authors have taken years to write their most well-known works. And sometimes, when they were stuck and they were left pushing out their roughest, most imperfect writing, they took a break.

For example, in one novel I've been working on, I pushed out most of the rough draft before realizing I needed to do a lot more worldbuilding, so I took a break and I've been only focusing on that since. I distanced myself from the book to clear my head and focus on what I needed to. Often, when the fog has passed, this is when the best ideas come. So take a break and remember that this is all a work in progress. You'll soon discover that you know what to write next. 

Bio: E. S. Foster is an sci-fi and fantasy author, blogger, and editor for ç. Her work has been published in Alien Dimensions, Sci-fi Shorts, Antipodean SF, and others. You can find her blog at fosteryourwriting.com and her author website at esfosterauthor.wordpress.com.