…And you need to let it go.
Hello friends,
If you’re a writer or author, you’ll definitely know the struggle of trying to decide when your book is good enough to publish and share with the world. If you’re me, then you’ll spend years rewriting and editing your work, trying to make it absolutely perfect, with no plot holes or spelling errors in sight. As long as there is potential to make it better, you’ll keep working on it, only to feel disappointed when it never seems to reach that “perfect” stage. Some books can do it, but at least for me, I’m never fully satisfied with what I write. If it were up to me, I’d spend another several years trying to improve it. Now don’t get me wrong, that is okay. If it weren’t for this desire, books would be published with obvious errors and it would take away the enjoyment from the story. But it becomes an issue when you get stuck in a loop like I did, and you continue to work on your book because it will never seem perfect to you. Here is why this is a bad mindset to have.
Number one: your book will never be perfect. It’s just a simple fact of being a writer and an author, especially an indie author. Not a single book in the history of publication is perfect, there is no such thing. You can go through as many editing sessions and rewriting copies as you want, but I bet you’ll always find one part of it that you wish was different or you wish you could fix. Or, even more likely, you’ll publish your book only to discover later on that there’s a part of it you wish you would’ve fixed prior to publishing it. But finding errors in your book after publication is a whole other subject that I’ll talk about another day.
I’m not saying you should publish your book despite feeling unsatisfied with it. You should be proud of what you made and how much hard work you put into it, and if you need to work a little more to feel satisfied with it, you can do that. What I’m trying to prevent is falling into the endless loop of never feeling satisfied with your work and believing you have to edit and fix it until it is “perfect.” If you keep that up, you’ll be working on your book forever, when you could’ve published it a long time ago but you were too scared to. That’s another thing, a lot of times we try to edit and rewrite our books because we’re procrastinating publishing it. That’s what I did for a long time. I realized that my desire to make my book perfect was just an excuse to keep working on it and not having to publish it yet, because I was still terrified of that. Once I realized that trying to make my book to achieve perfectionism was just a cover up, it made me more determined to get rid of the mindset that my book had to be perfect in order to publish it.
I’ll be the first to admit that even after my book has been published, I still reread my book and find things that I want to change or fix. But I try to remind myself that if I fix those things, it will cause me to fall down that endless hole again and I’ll be stuck in a pattern of fixing every single little error I see in my book. And they’re all really small things too. Little character descriptions that I feel like I need, conversations that I feel like would advance the plot more. My book is perfectly fine without them, but once I see them, I can’t unsee them, and I feel like I can’t move on until I fix them. But I’ve had to learn how to let go. My book will never be perfect and I need to let it go. Your book will never be perfect and you need to let it go, otherwise you’ll never be able to improve and grow as an author, and achieve all the things that you want to do with your book.
Your book is beautiful despite it’s flaws, and I’m so proud of you.