Today I ran up against the nemesis called “Vision of Perfection” while I was working on my novel. VoP is a foe I have encountered before and thought I had permanently defeated, but today she showed up once again and tried to derail my work.

Vision of Perfection or VoP works like this. You have a plan for a specific scene, a vision of what you want the scene to convey, but then you get stuck when trying to make your vision a reality. This drive to create a “perfect” scene that matches some “vision” you have begins to slow you down and in the worst case can stop you cold. Not good.

Sure, VoP starts out with a noble impulse. “Let’s write a perfect scene”, but when the drive for perfection gets in the way of completing the writing it needs to be recognized and put down fast. If you don’t deal with VoP quickly, you can get into a cycle where nothing you are writing seems good enough, and eventually you may want to throw away your entire work and begin again. What you end up with if VoP takes over your writing life is a closet full of half completed manuscripts.

Presently I am working on the last two chapters of my novel. I have a vision of what I want those chapters to be, and I have an outline that tells me what the scenes in those final chapters are supposed to accomplish and who the characters are in the scenes. Still, when I sat down to begin writing this crucial part of my novel, VoP showed up.

She was sweetly deceptive, her voice sultry and compelling…“Oh, the book is good, but this is the really important part… You have to get it right… It will make or break the book… Don’t mess this part up or the whole book will fail!”

Foolishly, I listened. And what did I do? I slowed down, thinking and re-thinking every word and action until my writing was nearly at a standstill. Then, I saw VoP for what she was, a hinderance to writing, and I banished her with one simple thought. What was the solution to VoP? The realization that anything that I write can be changed. A draft is just that – a draft. It all can be changed. Thus, write the scenes and when you are done look at the whole and see what works and what needs to be altered. Trust the writing process, and even more, trust the revision process.

Stop trying for perfection in a first draft and just write through to the end. Sure, try to get your vision down on paper, but understand that nothing you write is sacred and unchangeable. Drop the idea of perfection and remember that writing is an art.