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Every author has to abandon the ideal of a perfect publication
Bonnie Friedman, author of a book about writing called Writing Past Dark, advises that writers must give up on the ideal of a perfect book and “accept the imperfect book that appeared” (2014, p. 127). The same advice extends to scholarly writers who find it nearly impossible to stop tinkering with a manuscript and send it off for scrutiny by an editor of a journal or book. Writers I know share the experience of never being fully satisfied with what they have written. Once published, many don’t dare to re-read it!
Irish novelist, John Banville, embraces a life devoted to writing as an eternally unsuccessful quest for perfectionism. “I keep pressing on, trying to get it right, even as I know I will never get it right”, he said during an interview.
Strategies to Combat Perfectionism
Other than accepting the inevitability that you will never be fully satisfied with what you’ve written, a deadline or competing priorities, is what drives most people to let go of a manuscript. This is when you tell yourself that reviewers will find other things to pick on that you could never anticipate. Without suggesting that it is a good idea to send off a sloppy manuscript, convincing yourself that the manuscript will likely go through several more rounds of revision is is a good strategy to offset the perfectionist in you.
Given that the editorial process can take two years or more, by the time you start reviewing proofs, you’ve forgotten all your petty grievances about wording and get the feeling that it is not you who wrote it anyway.
I will often go back through a draft of a manuscript dozens of times to try to simplify and clarify complex wording or to remove paragraphs that are not central to the main idea. I know it it time to force myself to stop when I start getting frustrated with it.
After I finish the first full draft of a manuscript, I try to set it aside for a few weeks to gain some distance from it. Typos and logic gaps are more likely to stand out when you have gained some distance from what you’ve written.
When no deadline looms, the principal way I am able to let go of an article or chapter is to start tinkering with ideas for another project. This only works after its been through many rounds of revisions and I recognize that the changes I am making are cosmetic and, on occasion, starting to do damage.