Perfection Is Not

If you ask me, perfection and art don't go together. Maybe they do for some people, but the quest for perfection – i.e. compulsion – is an art killer. A writing killer. 

So many writers I have known (including myself at times) can't sit down to write because of the fear of not doing it well enough. It might disguise itself as “I have no time,” but I think if you look more closely fear of not writing well enough might be the actual reason. 

And if they do get as far as chair, paper, pen then whatever words make it through are erased or torn up. It happened just yesterday in the workshop. A young woman, after reading one of the most powerful paragraphs I had ever heard, announced that it was the only part of what she had written that morning that she had allowed to survive. The rest she had erased. 

Destroying your writing is a form of suicide. Not writing at all is a sort of pre-emptive suicide. It's not easy to insist on life, on writing. 

I resist my own impulse to self-destroy by publishing online as soon as I write. I like this art form of writing and publishing instantly. It came to me of its own accord. I didn't copy it from anyone. It works for me. I write this way. In the beginning I wanted to be Virginia Woolf, at my desk every morning – it has morphed into this: writing mostly in the Authentic Writing workshops, writing in pen because the subsequent typing is a chance to make a few light changes. And then posting it. There's no time to destroy.

I've got a good sharp brain. I could criticize my writing. I'd make a great English professor if I wanted to go in that direction. But I do not. 

So I encourage all art-writers – people who write to discover something about themselves, to walk on new turf, people whose life goal is not to just mimic what others have done and been praised for – I encourage you to stop thinking. Thinking and writing do not go together.