I received this comment on one of my videos online:

“I have so many ideas, but when I start writing, nothing ever feels good enough. I end up overthinking every word and losing momentum before I even get into the flow.”

This is a very common challenge that writers face, and if you feel this way, you are not alone. When this happens, it’s usually because of overactive or misplaced perfectionism.

Now, perfectionism has its place. When you’re editing a final draft, for example. But it has no place in the drafting process. So the way to fix this is to learn how to switch your perfectionism on and off. It’s not easy, and it’s not instantaneous, but there are two very simple things you can do to learn this skill.

The first thing to do is get comfortable with writing badly. The best way to do this is to engage in daily low-stakes writing, where you give yourself permission to write with awful spelling, terrible grammar, cringey cliches and all.

I personally did this through something called Morning Pages, which is a concept from the book The Artist’s Way where you sit down every morning and write several pages longhand without thinking, without planning, without rereading, and without censoring yourself.

For this practice to have an effect, you need to do it for a very long time. Preferably, several months. In a perfect world, you would do Morning Pages every day for the rest of your life. Honing your creative writing craft is a lifelong journey, after all.

So that’s the first thing: get comfortable with writing badly. The second thing is to get very familiar with the writing process. Like I said, perfectionism has no place in the early stages of drafting. The more you learn about the process of drafting, redrafting, editing, and polishing, the more you will understand what each stage requires.

The best way to learn about the writing process is to go through it, so my recommendation is for you to write and finish something very, very short. Maybe you write a flash fiction story that’s just one page long. The practice of coming up with the idea, drafting the story, redrafting the story, and editing until you’re satisfied, is going to teach you a lot about how you work as a writer.

The more you know about the process, the more confident you become, and the easier it is to say No! to that perfectionist side of yourself, because you know better. Your perfectionism isn’t the boss of your creativity: you are.