Procrastination Doesn't Make Perfect
© Alfie Thompson, 2006
Since you always have excuses for not getting your writing done (or you wouldn’t be reading this), I would like to invite you to join a wonderful organization that will do you a tremendous amount of good. We have a 12-step program that I guarantee will get you past this...and onto success and fame and fortune as a novelist. Or it will...once I put the 12-step program together. Oh, and I probably should mention that the organization, M.P.A. (Master Procrastinators Anonymous) won’t be easy to join since I haven’t quite gotten around to forming it yet. But when I do, you’ll be the first to know and you won’t be sorry if you join.
In the meantime, there’s something you should know about procrastinating, especially when it concerns writing: only you can write the stories you have to tell. And as long as you procrastinate, your blank pages will remain blank pages. Your stories may never be told.
Several authors who first sold at the same time I did have written 40, 50 and even 60 novels in the same fifteen years it has taken me to write 10 and one non-fiction book. Those fast (and non-procrastinating) writers worry that people may think they just hammer out stories of questionable quality. But the truth is—and, shhhh, you have to promise not to tell anyone I told you this--those writers wrote stories that were good enough to sell. That’s an accomplishment and not easy. The hard truth is, those writers may not spend as much time nit-picking details as us slower writers do, but there is one thing that is absolutely true: the more you do anything, the better you get at doing it. Your mom was right when she said practice makes perfect.
While my early books may be a tiny bit better than theirs were—and that, like everything is in the eye of the beholder. I have a deep-down feeling if you were to take any of those authors’ first books and compare them with mine, your idea of which was better would depend totally on whether you preferred the type of stories they wrote more than you like the style and tone or characters in mine—now, I’m forty and fifty books behind those writers in practice. It will take me a long time to gain in quality what they have, just by practice and vast amount of experience. So if you’re procrastinating because you’re waiting for your work to be perfect, you’re going to get closer to perfection the more you write. And you aren’t doing that if you are here, coming up with a daily supply of excuses not to be writing.
Speaking from heart-searching, honest experience let me tell you one of the things I do see in those of us who are procrastinators. We are perfectionists. We can’t stand it not to be ‘right.’ Being a perfectionist-type procrastinator is tough. We don’t even want to start if we know we won’t have the time to make whatever we write ‘right.’ So I’ll share one more truth: you will never get anything creative ‘right.’ ‘Right’ also is in the eye of the beholder. You will get things ‘better’ and closer to ‘right’ the more you write.
When I do get around to starting PMA, the first step of the twelve will be:
#1.I admit I am powerless over perfection--that my life will be manageable only if I realize procrastination doesn’t make perfection; procrastination makes nothing. Only practice makes perfection.