Perfectionism and the death of writing

Because writing is supposed to be an uncontrollable urge fuelled by passion, divinely-inspired by Keats. Or something.

(I'm not actually that pretentious).

I'm going to try something I never realised was important. I'm going to write something, this, in one sitting, and publish it. Just to prove that I can.

I'm a perfectionist, and I have no right to call myself that really, because nothing I write is being close to perfect. It takes a long time for me to be comfortable sharing anything I write. My dad has a friend who's writing a novel. She's been writing it for 30 years. Every time it seems like she's close to sending it back to the publisher, she thinks of something else to edit. Your novel is your legacy to the world, you should be happy with it, but to me, this seems like passion turned to hell.

I've never had the experience of editing such a long piece of writing. Recently, writing a 1000 word quickly went from fun to agonising. I spent so long tweaking it that if in the end I just sent it off in a "There you bloody go" kind of way. I washed my hands of it.

I spent so long on it that I completely lost interest. And if it turns out to be awful, that's probably why.

You can't progress onto new ones, and therefore learn the lessons that those ones hold. There comes a point where you've milked everything you can from one project, why keep going until your enthusiasm has completely frazzled?

We can't all be wild Byronic literary heroes who spew genius on a whim. Editing is always involved. It's necessary. Your craft is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration, remember? But come on, sometimes it's just beyond the joke.

My becoming more laid back is going to take a shocking amount of work.