7 Practical Cures for the Perfectionism Writing Block
Perfectionism is not high standards, it is fear in a nicer coat. A contest judge shows how over-polishing kills poems and offers seven cures you can start using tonight.
A poet once sent me, along with her entry, a spreadsheet. Sixty-three rows, one per draft, with columns for date, syllable counts, and a mood rating for each revision session. She wanted me to know how seriously she took the work. I believed her, and it broke my heart a little, because the poem read exactly like its spreadsheet: correct, symmetrical, and embalmed. Somewhere around row twenty, I would bet, there was a living poem, and forty-three drafts of careful sanding had removed its fingerprints. This is the perfectionism writing block in its mature form, and it is sneakier than the beginner version, because it does not look like a block at all. It looks like diligence. The blocked perfectionist is often the hardest worker in the room, working hard at the precise activity that guarantees nothing ships.
The Two Disguises of the Perfectionist Block
Perfectionism blocks poets in two costumes. The first is the famous one: the blank page, the poem never started because it will not survive contact with the standard in your head. You can recognize this poet because they describe poems they are "planning to write" in beautiful detail and have described the same poems for three years.
The second costume is the spreadsheet: the poem never finished because finishing means the revising has to stop, and while the revising continues, the poem cannot be judged. Draft sixty-four is not a revision. It is a hiding place.
Both costumes cover the same body. Perfectionism is not a craft standard. It is a fear of verdicts, and every cure that works attacks the fear, not the craft.
Notice, too, how respectable both costumes look from the outside. The planner sounds visionary. The endless reviser sounds rigorous. Friends and workshops tend to applaud both, which is why this block can run undiagnosed for a decade: nobody stages an intervention for someone who appears to care too much. But count the finished poems. That number is the diagnosis, and for both costumes it reads the same. Zero this year, zero last year, and a rich interior life about the zeros.
Perfectionism is not high standards. It is fear wearing the costume of high standards.
What the Perfectionism Writing Block Costs on a Scoresheet
Let me make this concrete, because "perfectionism hurts your writing" sounds like something stitched on a pillow. Here is a stanza the way it might look at draft three, still warm:
My mother irons on Sunday nights,
the board groaning like a church pew,
steam rising off my father's shirts
as if the week itself were leaving them.
Rough edges, sure. The pew simile might be too loud. But it moves, and the last image earns its reach. Now here is the same stanza after forty more drafts of nervous improvement, and I promise you I receive this exact transformation every single month:
On Sunday evenings, mother would iron,
the old board creaking softly,
steam gently rising from the laundered shirts,
a quiet ritual at the close of the week.
Every risk has been negotiated down. "Groaning like a church pew" became "creaking softly" because the simile felt exposed. The week leaving the shirts became "a quiet ritual" because metaphor felt like something a judge might question. The stanza is now unimpeachable and untouchable, and on my five-part rubric it loses points in creativity, emotion, and language simultaneously, the three categories perfectionism always robs first. Structure survives. Perfectionists are excellent at structure. Structure is where fear goes to feel productive.
Seven Cures That Actually Work
I have watched a lot of poets fight this, some successfully. The winners never cured themselves with insight. They cured themselves with procedures, external rules that make the fear irrelevant. Here are the seven that keep working.
- Set a draft ceiling before you start. Write it at the top of the page: "This poem gets five drafts." A ceiling converts revision from a hiding place into a budget. You spend passes carefully when you know they end.
- Write the throwaway version first, on purpose. Tell yourself: this draft is the bad one, required by the process, judged by nobody. Perfectionists can write freely when failure is the assignment, because a bad draft that was supposed to be bad is a success.
- Timebox, never taskbox. "Revise until it is right" has no exit. "Revise for twenty-five minutes" does. The clock is a kinder boss than your standards and, unlike them, it eventually lets you leave.
- Keep a graveyard file. Perfectionists cannot cut a line because cutting feels like destroying evidence of effort. So do not cut, relocate. A file called GRAVEYARD receives every darling, nothing is lost, and the poem gets lighter. You will almost never return for the bodies, but the door being open is what lets you close it.
- Read the draft aloud once, then obey your flinches only. One pass, fix only where your voice stumbled or you winced. This replaces the infinite question "is it perfect?" with a finite one: "did I flinch?" Flinches run out. Doubts never do.
- Define done before you begin, out loud, in writing. "Done means: title, under thirty lines, no abstract noun in the last stanza, read aloud twice." If you cannot answer when is a poem finished in advance, the fear gets to answer it after, and the fear always answers never.
- Ship on a calendar, not on a feeling. The feeling of readiness is the one thing a perfectionist will never be issued. Waiting for it is waiting forever. A recurring external deadline replaces "when it is ready" with "on the 25th," which is a date, and dates arrive whether you feel ready or not.
The Cure Is a Verdict, Taken on Schedule
That seventh cure deserves its own section, because it is the one that fixed the spreadsheet poet. Perfectionism survives on postponed judgment; the poem that is never finished can never fail. So the treatment is regular, survivable doses of the thing being avoided: actual verdicts, arriving on actual dates, small enough that no single one can end you.
This is honestly the therapeutic accident of contest season. Writory's window runs the 1st to the 25th every month, results land on the 30th, and every entrant gets scored on five criteria whether they win or not. The spreadsheet poet started entering monthly on a dare from her writing group: whatever exists on the 24th gets submitted, no exceptions, no extra weekend of polishing. Her first two scores stung. Her third poem, five drafts old and slightly ragged, outscored everything she had ever embalmed, and she told me the number did more for her block than two years of being reassured by friends. Reassurance feeds perfectionism. Evidence starves it.
High Standards Are Not the Enemy
Now the caveat, because some careful reader is bristling: no, I am not telling you to love your first drafts and ship slop. High standards and perfectionism are opposites in the only way that counts.
- High standards serve the poem. Perfectionism serves your safety.
- High standards say "this line is weak, here is a stronger one." Perfectionism says "this line proves what you are."
- High standards finish things, because finishing is how standards get tested and raised. Perfectionism finishes nothing, because an untested standard can stay flattering forever.
- High standards can tell you a poem is done. Perfectionism does not actually have standards, only an alarm that rings at the thought of being read.
The revision skills themselves, cutting openings, sharpening verbs, breaking lines against the grammar, are exactly what you should be studying; a working knowledge of something as small as the line break will improve a poem more than ten anxious drafts. Learn the craft hard. Just aim it at the poem instead of at your own acquittal.
Draft Sixty-Four Never Comes
I wrote back to the spreadsheet poet that year, which I rarely do, and told her one true thing: the best rows in her spreadsheet were behind her, not ahead. Somewhere in the low twenties, before the mood column turned grim, there had been a night when the poem was alive and she had been too frightened to stop.
That is the perfectionist's real tragedy. Not that the work is never good enough, but that it frequently was, twenty drafts ago, and the fear talked right over it. Your poem does not need to be perfect to be finished. It needs to be finished to be anything at all. Set the ceiling, book the verdict, and let draft five leave the house. The house will still be standing on the 30th, and so will you.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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