Balancing perfectionism when writing

I've often wondered how the hell Rowling got through SEVEN Harry Potter books!!!

I write music but have never "finished" any songs by my definition. I WAY overproduce it, add parts, change sounds and listen to it over and over and over when it pleases me just right. I keep promising myself that I will change that but yet I'm still a major perfectionist.

Personally I have trouble writing shorter things. Like this message.
What you're reading now is probably nothing like what I started out with.

Though, when it comes to writing longer stories I just go with what feels right. It's as though the details doesn't matter that much when I exceed 2K words, then it's more what is happening in the text than how I write it.
I guess this isn't helping you out much though.

I think it's due to my tendency to look at the whole, the bigger picture kinda. And when you look at it that way, suddenly those small "flaws" don't seem all that bad anymore. I can live with the smaller flaws if I think the text has a nice flow, a good story and I manage to get my point through.

I personally love tweaking things, but after a while, it get quite tedious. The way I love revising little sentences so they sound better individually, but corrupt the overall text, and that upsets me. Good thing in modern technology, there's the "Undo Button".
Straying a little off topic:
The undo button is my ultimate saviour. I bump the mouse or some kind of self destruct key and WHAMMO! A 5 paragraph essay vanishes before my eyes. All I have to click is "Edit", "Undo" and VOILA! It's dissapearing trick is nothing compared to the power of my undo button!
Wow, talk about irony. Just as I finished revising my paragraph, I hit the edit button to fix a sentence..

Conscience said:

I personally love tweaking things, but after a while, it get quite tedious. The way I love revising little sentences so they sound better individually, but corrupt the overall text, and that upsets me

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That's exactly what I'm talking about!

DinoFFS said:

when it comes to writing longer stories I just go with what feels right. It's as though the details doesn't matter that much when I exceed 2K words, then it's more what is happening in the text than how I write it.
I guess this isn't helping you out much though.

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This might be more help than you think - maybe if I just get on with it this will work for me too. I can hope so anyway :laughing:

MilkyLatte said:

I only write short stories. Then I forget about them, find them a couple of weeks later, reread them and edit them.

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This is also a good idea. I usually find that if I leave something long enough and then come back to it, usually I see things in a new light and can fix whatever problems I had with it with more ease. This counts for everything from Guitar Hero to schoolwork, and I'm pretty sure writing is somewhere in between those two (maybe).

Anyways asmit, I don't think your perfectionism is necessarily such a bad thing. If it drives you to keep improving, and to keep trying to do better it is as much of a blessing as it is a curse. Sure it takes ages to complete a text when you have to edit it, but I think what would really help you is to first finish the text "imperfectly" for then to go back to it and edit your way through. If you hang on to all versions of it, maybe you'll even notice how something you edited away before was actually not that bad to begin with. If you keep going strong you will have a "perfect" work in the end, just have patience.

I for one think it's better to find a way to work with your over-enthusiastic perfectionism than to try to work against it. Just my 5 extra cents

I usually have to do things in one sitting. I find that if I'm writing, a good idea is to just write/type everything.. then you can read over it afterwards and if you feel the need, write it out again and choose the parts you want to keep.
Music recording is a tiresome process for me. I loathe it. I have to do it in one sitting or I don't get back to it. Even if a song is recorded but there is a little bit of mixing involved.. I just can't do it.. my heart is no longer in it or I'm afraid I'll trash it.

To write a 20,000 word story would take me a while. I'd have to do it in one sitting or hope that it ends up finished one day. Handwriting definitely helps with writing. A lot more feeling comes out when I write over typing. It feels like I'm clearer with writing and allow more for mistakes, which end up fitting or allow other ideas to arise. A bit of paper to scribble notes or doodles on is good too. The whole point is to keep the flow, I think.

With writing messages, I too find it difficult to keep what I had in the beginning. With this message, I've decided not to edit it but I still changed one or two things. I'll start with around a page and then go over it for 5-10 minutes. The finished product has like 2 sentences and I go "AURGH!".

The only real advice I have about overcoming perfectionism when writing is to write, write, write. I write almost daily in my journal and I have an online "pen pal," another INFP who can tolerate my long, convoluted letters and who writes me long, poetic letters in return. I'm not really a creative writer, but I write articles for my own civil liberties blog. The temptation is to spend increasing amounts of time doing research, then polishing and repolishing after I've written the first draft of an article. Trouble is, in the world of political blogging, shorter is better, and the most successful article I've written I cut from five pages to two. It took six revisions.

I have tried to start a few novels, but have crashed and burned after about twenty pages. I don't think perfectionism is the problem. I think I suck at character development and dialog...LOL, minor difficulties