I am leading a Story Circle Network “20 Minutes a Day” Writing Challenge this month. Approximately 42 women are participating in this challenge, and each has signed up to write 20 minutes a day, 6 days a week for 4 weeks. They are divided into accountability groups of 5 to 6 members, and each group is encouraged to share daily emails with one another to give and receive encouragement when they meet their daily 20-minute writing goal. The bigger goal of the challenge is to form a daily writing habit over these next four weeks.

As part of my role as lead “encourager” during the challenge, I’ve been reading lots of books and articles on writing and writing habits. I will share various parts of what I’m learning in two weekly 10-minute videos that will be sent to our participants. The first week’s videos were a short welcome and then a ten-minute video on the 20-Minute-a-Day writing process that I use. Tonight, while perusing online resources to aid in my encouragement, I came across this quote from author Ursula K. LeGuin:

Perfectionism is our most compulsive way of keeping ourselves small, a kind of psychoemotional contortionism that gives the illusion of reaching for greatness while constricting us into increasingly suffocating smallness.

I think perfectionism is a truly debilitating force and agree wholeheartedly with Le Guin’s sentiments. I have felt the constriction of perfectionism in my own writing life many times and have gotten trapped in that smallness. It’s a truly miserable place to find oneself and is antithetical to the joy and expansiveness that are the best parts of the creative process. 

While I am not advocating for slap-dash, first-draft writing that is just fine the way it is, I am advocating for using that slap-dash approach to get writing on the page. At that point, the piece can be strategically edited so that it’s ready for readers’s eyes. I am a true believer in Ray Bradbury’s “Throw up in your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon” philosophy. That keeps perfectionism to a minimum so that there are actual words to edit on the page.

Ursula K. Le Guin was a prolific writer with 23 novels, 12 volumes of short stories, 11 volumes of poetry, 13 children’s books, five essay collections, and four works of translation. She clearly knew a lot about avoiding smallness.

I am grateful for Le Guin’s reminder and am happy to pass it on to our writing challenge participants.

Perfectionism = smallness. A miserable and crippling place to be. Loosen up. Let the words flow imperfectly. There will be plenty of time afterward to tidy things up before saying “Good enough.” Life is about forward movement, not standing in one place out of fear. Just as Voltaire said, “Don’t let perfect become the enemy of good.”

Amen.