Advice for perfectionists

I finally wrote a novel, and I’m 69% done with the rewrite. It makes me want to give advice to those that procrastinate:

Here’s the thing. If you’re like me, you are a perfectionist. You may spend forever revising a chapter – chapter 1 – until it is flawless. Then you’d go, “where’s this going. It’s not all that good,” and you start chapter 1 again. You’ve written a hundred chapter 1’s that go nowhere.

Sure, it’s good practice. But eventually you have to write a story. You know, stop daydreaming and writing snippets and actually start the damned thing at the beginning and finish it 80,000 words or so later. But that not easy if you worry about every detail.

That’s why you must write and worry about how good it is when you’re not so busy writing. Don’t hand ten pages to a friend and ask them how good it is. Just keep going. Write all the way to the end.

The rewrite will give your obsessive side the room it wants to be picky and cynical. By the time you go back, you’ll know your characters. Plot holes will be apparent, and you can fix them. You can make your descriptions more descriptive. But save it for the rewrite.

Right now all you need to do is write.