At least you get the gist of it.

Don’t let writing be blocked by perfectionism.

Hi, my name is Ken, and I’m a perfectionist. I first tried perfectionism as a kid, and since then, I’ve always looked for ways to make things more perfect. (Don’t ask me how many times I rewrote that sentence.) Perfectionism leads to the worst time of writer’s block for me.

How could I possibly start an essay without having a perfect outline in mind, one that weaves so effortlessly through all of my key points at such a level of detail that it may as well be the entire writing itself? Even with an outline in mind, it seems that whenever I start writing, all the thoughts that seemed so effortlessly self-proving come out in a jumbled slurry. It is horrifying at times. And it becomes less painful to not write, to not even open the door to that chance.

Reject perfection, embrace vulnerability.

To add yet another block, writing for an unknown audience is scary. It’s like throwing thoughts into the void, except the void is an 800 pound gorilla who hates being pelted with imperfect thoughts and has an ample supply of bricks to return to you. Also the gorilla is responsible for your job and wealth and friends and reputation and has become such a tortured metaphor that he is especially enraged and sensitive to any stray imperfections.

Is that catastrophizing? Maybe. Regardless, the gorilla always hangs out at the periphery of my vision when I’m writing. He tells me not to publish anything that has a single word out of place, a single sentence unedited.

Rejecting the gorilla is hard, and I don’t really have great advice on how to do it. I’ve found that I write more freely at night, when I’m a little tired and there are fewer inhibitions on the words that hurtle out of my mind. You might want to fight the gorilla of perfection with another animal of choice. Perhaps a giraffe of social commitment that is empowered when you tell your friends that you’ve started blogging, and the shame of having a blog with only two pages overwhelms the gorilla. Or the lion of delusional optimism, wherein you become so confident about your inevitable success that the gorilla fades away into the shadows. Whatever it is, find something to push you forwards that overpowers the friction and inertia that make it so easy to stay still.

(Looking back, I’m going to call night-time writing the rhino of reduced inhibitions. I don’t know why this swerved so completely into random and increasingly unnecessary animal metaphors, but I can’t not commit to the bit at this stage. I also need to shoe-horn in a monkey somewhere, then I can title this section “embrace monke”.)

Even bad writing is good.

I’ve written lots of things that I wouldn’t say I’m proud of. Not because they are actively awful, but because I get this nagging feeling that they could be better in ways I can’t quite identify. I choose to publish them anyways. Only through practice can you get better at something. I’m trying to get better at writing and at sharing things that are still in the draft and haven’t been perfect. Even throughout my rambling and meandering, as long as you roughly understand what I’m going for, that’s a win.

Epistemic status: self-evidencing.