At the time of writing this, I have too many unfinished drafts I’m slogging through. As well as a backlog of ideas I want to pour my time and energy into once those are finished. The river never really ends. And that’s okay.
We need to keep the flow going, when we choke the flow of our creativity by stumbling over our own need to be perfect and release the best-selling book in the world we cut off the flow. We tell our muse, who is already temperamental enough, to kindly ‘eff off’, for a little while while we sit with our own self-doubt.
Instead I’m going to recommend an alternate course. One I need to follow myself.
Finishing and shipping when it’s ‘good enough’. Nothing you do will ever be perfect. You will never be perfect. So, stop trying. The ceaseless perfectionism is draining you of your creative potential and is just plain exhausting.
The number of unfinished manuscripts or ideas you’ve stashed away under your bed doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is finishing and shipping.
Finishing is more important than having a good idea. Please don’t die with your work still inside of you. Someone smarter than me said that once.
Write shitty, make a fucking mess. Clean it up a tad, give it a nice polish and give it to the world. It’s not your baby anymore, it’s time for it to blossom on its own. Stop trying to engineer damn perfect wings, give it the best wings you know how to make and wish it best of luck.
Your ability to refine and create wings for your work will get better with time, but only if you let them fly. Some of them will crash and burn, but others may reach places you couldn’t see from the ground.
These new horizons will inform your future work and your future self. It’s all a process anyways.
Create and let it go.