Always Move On To Your Next Writing Project

Art For Art's Sake: Part 16

May 18

The other day, I watched a Lee Child interview (author of the Jack Reacher thriller novel series), and there was this one thing he said that struck me.

He said that when he sent off his first novel to the editor, he immediately got working on the next one.

Isn't that something all us writers should be doing? Start a project, finish it and move on?

And it doesn't need to be a book project. We usually take more time than required, even with smaller projects like chapters, articles, blog posts, and captions.

We simply cannot be done with our projects. We are constantly tinkering and tweaking a sentence here and a sentence there. We don't realise that there's no end to this kind of polishing your work. As we keep polishing, we don't see that we are destroying the good work we have written.

There will come a time when you need to tie the bow and send out your work into the world.

But why can't we leave our projects when they are good enough?

It's because of Perfectionism.

Perfectionism is not about getting things right or about fixing things. It also has nothing to do with the standards you set for yourself.

Here's how Julia Cameron defines Perfectionism in her book, The Artist's Way -

Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead. It is a loop - an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing and to lose sight of the whole.

When we think of ourselves as writers, we imagine having multiple books under our belt. And yet, when the time comes to act like a writer, we believe the book we are currently working on will make or break our career.

In trying to write the perfect book, we lose our reason as to why we want to write, and we lose our reasoning with the book at hand.

Instead of enjoying the process of being a writer, we constantly judge our work-in-progress against the results we hope to achieve from the audience. Doing so, we end up with a book that sounds similar to every book in your genre.

But why is it that we want a perfect book?

Because that's the ego talking.

When we write a book, we want it to become the best-selling. We want everyone to love our book. We want celebrities to recommend our books. We want our readers to say our book changed their lives. If we write a fiction book, we want it to be turned into a movie. If we write a non-fiction book, we want to be invited to speaking events and share our thoughts. And we want to make money.

In short, we want the recognition and appreciation we think we deserve.

Having such wants is a natural effect of working hard on something, like writing a book. The problems come when our desires take a higher priority than our needs.

As writers, our need is to have a fulfilling and impactful career. Our need is to share our thoughts and see what others think about them. Our need is to use our words to find resonance with others. Our need, as writers, is to know that none of us is alone on this life journey.

And our needs are only fulfilled when we keep writing and sharing.

So if you genuinely want to be a writer, always move on to your next writing project. That's where true happiness for us lies.