Beating Perfection Syndrome, by Angela Booth

During the week, you had a stream of plausible ideas. You wrote three ideas in your notebook: an article about children's first words (your six month old said 'truck'), an essay about male vanity, and a short story about a blonde with tattooed arms and a poodle. 

Just now, none of those ideas seems right. You've only got an hour, so you want the perfect idea, the one that will justify the sixty minutes you're about to spend on it. Instead, you do nothing. 

Perfection Syndrome can destroy your writing career. It's a killer, because if you don't recognise it for what it is, it leads to apathy. The gap between what's in your head and what manifests on the page is so wide that you may give up writing for days or weeks. 

I understand Perfection Syndrome, because it's something I battle every day. The words on the screen or the page never measure up to the words in my head. I start typing, and after a sentence or two, stop. The words "this is garbage" light up like neon in my skull, my stomach clenches, and I feel as if a ten ton weight had dropped onto my body. It's not as if I'm a new writer. I've been writing for over 20 years.