Perfectionism: Is It Healthy?

Some thoughts about why writers struggle so hard

The first thing I’d like to acknowledge is that none of us are perfect. Only God is perfect. However, I think it’s interesting to question whether to seek perfection in creative work is a healthy and noble aspiration.

I recently finished writing and editing a book titled Reflections: Enlightening Insights Into the Divine Mystery and strove hard to make the book as error-free as possible. However, yesterday, I decided to read through one of the ten author copies I had ordered and I spotted a typo. I had mistakenly written ‘as’ instead of ‘is’ in one of the sentences.

Fellow writers will know how frustrating this experience can be. We want our work to be as perfect as possible, and I think the reason why is because we want our work to produce the highest feelings of understanding and satisfaction in readers. We feel that even a small error will create feelings of negativity and therefore go to great lengths to make our work error free.

After spotting the typo and experiencing that sinking feeling, I had a difficult decision to make. Do I accept the imperfection in the knowledge that others will spot it and be disheartened? Or do I revisit the manuscript, make the edit, export the manuscript again and republish the book to all publishing platforms? Do I throw away my ten author copies on the basis of a single typo?

I decided that the extra effort was worth the pursuit of perfection, but I had to pray about whether or not this was something God wanted me to do. I don’t know whether a human being has ever created a piece of work that they are perfectly happy with, and I wondered whether I should simply accept the imperfection. However, God led me to correct the error and do the work necessary to republish the book, which only took around an hour and which I feel was well worth the effort.

It’s a blessing that in the age of self-publishing we do have the opportunity to republish our work when we spot something we aren’t content with. Of course, this does mean that there are often several versions of our work in existence, which can in itself be disheartening. But at least, when we feel convinced we have weeded out all significant errors, we can rest easy in the feeling that the best version possible of our work is available to new readers, should they be interested in reading it.

It’s worth pointing out that there is a subjective element to writing and someone may feel they have spotted a mistake which, to the author, is perfectly coherent. So I feel the job of an author is to reach a stage with their work where they are totally happy with it and hope that this satisfaction and confidence in their work communicates to others, even though others may notice things that they feel are imperfect. We all bring our unique knowledge, understanding and perception to our reading of any piece of work, and there will always be someone who spots what they feel are imperfections. Does anyone except God understand the English language perfectly?

In the age of AI, many people are striving for perfection by letting AI do the work, but the use of AI is usually fairly blatant and produces feelings of dissatisfaction in readers who want their experience of an author’s work to be totally authentic. That’s why I never use AI to write as much as a sentence in any of my books.

I suppose there is the deeper question of why creatives feel motivated to create perfect work at all. Is it the desire to be loved? To make money? To make other people happy? Perhaps there are a combination of factors for any creative.

All things considered, the feeling of creating a piece of work that I am happy with brings a sense of satisfaction, and I suppose we all gain a sense of satisfaction from achieving things in the work we do. This could be considered a divine mystery, perhaps, but it could be that God rewards hard work with feelings of contentment.

Of course, all things ultimately exist for the glory of God, and in reality He is the author of any piece of work that any of us create, so our creative efforts should always be considered in this context.

I apologise for the imperfections in this article 😊