Voltaire said, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” Actually Voltaire said, “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.” As writers, we need to take these words to heart.
I know when I’m worrying over which font I used, and I’m spending time making sure that all the pages have exactly 25 lines, I know there’s something I’m avoiding.
Sometimes I run spell-check after spell-check and grammar check after grammar check (even though I argue with Microsoft’s grammar checker).
I have a friend who was obsessing over how the bold didn’t show in her blog when viewed with the Firefox browser. No one ever left a blog never to return because there wasn’t any bold.
I can spend a whole day checking out blog themes, down loading blog themes, uploading blog themes to my hosting account, and then editing them when they don’t look right. Does this get any posts written? Does this move my career forward? Can I tell myself I’m being productive?
When we send our words out in the world, we are putting ourselves on view for anyone who reads them. That takes a lot of courage.
We all know how the gremlins put in the typos the minute we hit send or drop our packet in the mailbox. This is the way writing is.
We have to let go of our quest for perfection. If we are to be real writers who share our stories with others, we have to let go of our words.
- We have to give the best of ourselves while we write.
- Our writing needs to be good enough to represent us well.
- We need to provide good information or entertaining stories.
- We need to leave the reader wanting more of our work.
When we’ve done that we can sit back and press the send key or drop the packet in the mail, and know we’ve done our best.
We need to stop messing with the inessential details and do what we really need to do to move forward.
One site I’ve found that makes the important clear in a fun way is Simpleology. Sign up for their free Simpleology 101 course. You won’t regret it.
What is your favorite way of avoiding what you need to do while telling yourself you are being productive?
Write on,
Lynn Jordan
September 17th, 2008 at 8:32 pm
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