How to Overcome Perfectionism and Actually Finish Your Writing

Plus the winner of last week's Peter Stothard book competition

In last week’s newsletter I ran a competition to win a signed copy of Peter Stothard’s Alexandria (see below for winner). I asked you to answer 5 quick questions about your writing to enter the competition and the subject of perfectionism came up several times, so I thought I’d write about it this week.

The Perfectionism Trap

So you sit down to write, determined to make some actual P on your WIP. But you find yourself stuck on the same sentence, rewriting it over and over. You tell yourself you just need to get it right—you just can’t move on.

Sound familiar?

Understanding Perfectionism in Writing

Why does this happen? I can think of a few reasons:

• Fear of failure. We worry it’s just not good enough, forgetting the importance of failure in the writing process. As Julie Mae Cohen told us—”You have to get it wrong before you get it right.”

• Fear of judgment. Once our work is out there, we know we’re going to be exposed to scrutiny. We’re laying ourselves bare but we’re afraid of being vulnerable.

• Comparison with other writers. All those fabulous authors you love to read? Not as good as them, are you? (An author once told me he only reads authors he can’t stand because he knows he’s better than them.)

• Unrealistic expectations. Why can’t I bash out a perfect first draft?

All of the above cause us stress. The best form of stress avoidance is procrastination. And a great way to procrastinate is to endlessly rewrite in pursuit of perfection. If we never put our work out into the world we’ll never fail, we’ll never be judged, we won’t suffer from comparisonitis and we’ll always meet our expectations.

The Myth of the Perfect First Draft

Great writing doesn’t happen in the first draft—it happens in revision.

“The first draft of anything is shit.” -Ernest Hemingway

But if you never allow yourself to write a messy draft, you’ll never have anything to revise. Instead of striving for perfection in your first draft, focus on getting your ideas down. You can fix them later.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Strategies to Break Free from Perfectionism

Here’s a few ideas to try, let me know what works for you.

1. Give Yourself Permission to Write Badly

Yes, really. Give yourself explicit permission to write Hemingway’s shitty first draft. The goal is to get the words and ideas out of your head and onto the page—otherwise known as a vomit draft.

2. Set Word Count Goals

Word count goals don’t work for everyone. But as a way of bypassing the urge to perfection, it’s worth trying. Focus on hitting your 500 or 1000 words, make a big deal of it. Celebrate when you hit your target. Do a little dance.

3. Use Timed Writing & Freewriting

If word count targets don’t float your boat, set a timer instead. Try the Pomodoro technique—write for 25 minutes, take a short break, then repeat. Don’t allow yourself to go back and edit. Just write.

The trick here is to write without stopping, just knock out the words in a stream of consciousness burst, otherwise known as freewriting.

4. Write in Longhand

I’ve written about this before (Do This 1 Thing To Improve Your Creativity Right Now...) but writing in longhand may actually improve your creativity. I’ve also found it’s easier to write without constantly self-editing when writing in longhand. The visibility of typos on a screen and the temptation to correct and rewrite is always there, so try going old school and break out the Bic.

5. Create a “Messy First Draft” Ritual

Don’t go all Wicker Man on us and start burning effigies, but signal to your brain that what you’re about to create is allowed to be imperfect by ritualising it. Light a candle, use a special notebook, or play that Emerson, Lake and Palmer album that everyone else in your family hates. Whatever. Just don’t get naked and get the matches out.

Embrace Imperfection

Nobody’s perfect. We are all flawed. Most of us have learned to accept our own flaws and those of our friends and family. So why should we expect our writing to be perfect? It is our imperfections that make us who we are. Let our work reflect that.

Here’s one last thing to try.

Share your work before you feel ready. Sign up for our next Writeshare Night, take a deep breath and read something to the group.

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Peter Stothard Book Competition

Last week’s competition to win a signed copy of Alexandria by Peter Stothard has been won by…. Robyn Todd! Check your inbox for an email from me, Robyn, and I’ll arrange sending it to you.

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Member News

Emily Goode has some news about The Complaint, an award winning short film she wrote the screenplay for. It’s screening at Reading Biscuit Factory on Wednesday 26th March. Tickets available here.

Yes, it clashes with our Feedback event at Fourbears that night, so you’ll have to choose!

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This Week's Meeting

Writes & Bites - an in person social event!

At our regular social night out, we leave our notebooks and laptops behind and gather at a local restaurant for a meal and a chat. This time we went to Rosa’s Thai Reading, a new restaurant for us and for Reading, having just opened in January.

The restaurant is on Jackson’s Corner on the site of the old family-run department store that was a Reading institution for 138 years until it finally closed its doors in 2013. Right up until it closed, Jackson’s of Reading used a pneumatic tube system to transact sales, the last such system still functioning anywhere. Instead of cash registers on the shop floor, a network of pneumatic tubes would deliver a customer’s money and a ticket in a capsule to the cash office upstairs. Their receipt and change would quickly pop back down the tubes by return. It wasn’t quite as chaotic as the one Jonathan Pryce had to cope with in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil:

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Next Week's Meeting

Prompt-Write Night

Wednesday, March 19, 2025 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM GMT

Feeling stuck? Unblock yourself in this writing session where I set a prompt or theme for members to use as a jumping off point for an hour of writing. You can use it to write fiction or non-fiction, poetry or prose.

This event will be online via Zoom, register to attend on Meetup to get the link:

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Free To Join, Free To Attend

When

Crystal Bourque

founded Caversham Writers she did so with two main principles that I have tried to uphold since taking over: that it be inclusive and open to all writers at any level of experience and in any genre ("If you write, you're a writer") and that it be free to join and free to attend. Substack does have a paid subscription tier, but in keeping with our foundational principle I have no plans to start charging.

(If you want to help me keep Caversham Writers free to join and free to attend, you can always Buy Me a Coffee - any contributions go towards the running of the group)