This Story May Not Be Good — But It’s Good Enough
I have met the enemy of my writing, and it is perfectionism
Time for a confession.
I have 181 articles in my writing folder in various stages of completion. They range in length from seven words to over 3,000 words. They were all created in the past 18 months, and in total I have written more than 125,000 words.
Some of these drafts are, I think, pretty good. Some are idle ramblings. A few are pure drivel. But they all have one thing in common: They’ve never been seen by anyone’s eyes but my own.
Why? Because they’re not perfect. Duh.
The surprising thing is not that I have amassed nearly 200 unpublished articles in a year-and-half. No, what’s surprising — what’s damn-near miraculous — is that I somehow managed to actually publish 17 stories on Medium in that span.
It’s miraculous, to me anyway, because it means I somehow beat my inner critic into submission long enough for me to hit the “publish” button and let a handful of stories out for the world to read.
All of these stories were received favorably by at least a few people. A few were received favorably by a few thousand people. You’d think that would be enough to inspire me to, you know, publish a lot more.
