I love this week’s guest blog from Sue Thomason. She says:

“When I answered Suzy’s request for guest bloggers I didn’t know that the action of writing this would be so relevant to Week 7 itself. I promised to have the copy in by Friday and read through Week 7 and then I sat down to write this blog post. Eight terrible drafts later, I went back to the Artist’s Way. I laughed and laughed as I read the sections on perfectionism and risk.

I was writing about not allowing perfectionism to take over your life and I was trying to do it perfectly!

My creativity was stifled by the need for total control over the outcome – the perfect outcome. Perfectionism is just a fear of failure, of looking bad. I know what happens when your writing is motivated by what people think instead what’s coming from inside you. You can see it when you look at any creative effort. When you see films, for example, that are obviously created solely to make money, such as some big budget blockbusters that are all action and no plot, lots of exploding cars and weak dialogue where every character sounds the same, and compare them with beautifully executed films full of passion and story that light up the screen and pull on you in a way that makes you think about them for days and you know that they have come from somewhere deep in someone’s heart and mind. It’s the same for writing, you can tell when someone is dipping into that rich well of inner ideas that Julia describes and when someone is self consciously thinking about how others will see what they’ve written. Same for painting, drawing, making music or any kind of art.

And most brilliant art isn’t perfect anyway (except maybe for The Great Gatsby). It’s flawed and it’s the flaws that make it brilliant. They aren’t really flaws at all but as much a part of the personality of the artist as the bits that do turn out to be perfect.

Perfectionism is a lie. It promises you a diamond, unflawed and glittering and all the adoration and approval you could ever ask for. But what you really get is procrastination, fear, stifling self consciousness and inaction.

And that’s exactly what I got when I started writing this, my first ever guest blog post. And that’s also what I’ve had from the past five years of working on the same single book that I still haven’t finished because it’s just not perfect enough and I can’t get past chapter six without going back to the beginning again and changing something.

I’ve learnt a big lesson this week. Quite a practical lesson too. So to get this blog post written, I abandoned the first batch of ‘imperfect’ drafts and started again. One draft, a stream of consciousness with no going back and no editing and, most importantly, no thinking: ‘What will they think of me?’

I asked myself Julia’s question: ‘What would I do if I didn’t have to do it perfectly?’

And this is it. Now I’m going to take this question and apply it to everything else in my life.