I try not to spend too much time on Reddit because I only end up fighting with strangers; I really can’t help myself. The same thing happened on Twitter, which is why I gave up that hellscape.

But beyond the verbal brawls, Reddit does offer inspiration for blog posts. Like the one you’re reading.

Here’s my muse:

Unfortunately, many would-be writers are afflicted with this curse. They simply cannot accept that whatever they’re going to write at the very beginning of their journey will be more artificial than a 1950s aspic cake – and just as unappetizing.

Let’s explore this unique affliction and determine some possible explanations, then get into solutions.

As usual, this may hurt your feelings because it hits too close to home. Please know that nothing I say here is meant to hurt or demoralize you. I wouldn’t say it if I wasn’t hoping for your success; that’d just be petty bullying. I want you to finish your books, to enjoy writing, and to keep going.

Anyway, try to go into this post with an open mind. Set it down for a bit if you have to, but consider pushing through to the end.

Let me clarify that I’m not a psychologist. I have a deep interest in the human mind but no training in it. Except for being very mentally ill myself. Experiential credentials!

Writing perfectionism, in my opinion, is different than normal perfectionism.

Garden variety perfectionism is the fear of making mistakes, often due to past trauma or overly strict parenting. However, that’s not really what is powering a perfectionist writer, at least from what I have seen.

Instead, a writer’s perfectionism is about ego. These are individuals who are extrinsincally motivated: they want the attention and praise that comes from writing.

As such, the type of writing advice I offer here – that writing should prioritize intinsic motivation – often falls very flat.

And that’s what I tend to fight about on Reddit. I find myself dragged into arguments with these individuals who spend a lot of time daydreaming about being a writer but not very much time completing their projects.

These individuals get extremely angry when I, or other experienced writers, tell them to stop worrying about the result and just do the thing. They love to get my goat, feed it Poptarts, and let it loose in a Kroger. That is their primary hobby, not writing.

We see this in the above post. The OP is talking about all the rewards that will come from writing: the praise, the breathless excitement, the worldwide acclaim. They are jealous of their friend who is writing a story because other people are paying attention to the friend.

So there is an essence of fear for perfectionist writers, but it’s not the fear of making mistakes: it’s the fear of being ignored. The fear of not being good enough to get the attention they want.

Extrinsic motivation creates high pressure, which causes writer’s block.

Extrinsic motivation is awful for getting yourself to do anything, because it ties your success to something you can’t control: other people’s responses.

OP could write a beautiful book with heartfelt lines and jawdropping quotes … and no one might read it. Does that mean it didn’t matter? Given OP’s current perception, yes.

So the whole time OP is writing, they are thinking about what other people want from the book. It’s all about, “How will people react? What will they care about? How can I make this seem heartfelt but not too mushy but also deep but not childish but but but ….”

Sounds exhausting. No wonder OP can’t come up with a story idea. There’s so much pressure in there! How are you supposed to work with such high expectations riding on you?

Even extremely accomplished people will crack in stressful situations. This is why world leaders seem 40 years older at the end of a term: their bodies are under so much stress that it physically ages them. Maybe not twice the rate of a normal human, but it definitely adds some gray hairs.

High stress also reduces creativity, because creativity is one of the most intensive forms of Higher Order Thinking imaginable. (Hah.)

But the sad thing is that in OP’s case, this stress is self-imposed, and it has everything to do with their perspective. No one’s forcing OP to feel such anxiety about their work – which doesn’t even exist because of that anxiety.

That mentality is extremely unhelpful. Let me tell you why.

Writers have no clue who their real audience is and may never know.

In a similar post on r/writing, which I won’t bother to share here, I got into a fight with another Redditor. Yeah, sigh, of course I did.

That Redditor was complaining that having intrinsic motivation is too hard and unrealistic. They insisted that the whole point of writing is to share it with other people, because, according to them, the concept of writing came from storytelling around campfires or whatever.

Actually, it didn’t. Writing emerged to keep track of stuff: grains, debts, and so on. The oldest writing systems were basically Excel spreadsheets.

Later, people realized that they could write down the stories they were telling around campfires so other people could tell them in other places. That was a happy little accident of counting our sheep.

Why does that distinction matter? Because writing is not the same as telling a story around a campfire. Those stories were told face to face. Over the glowing coals, narrators could physically see the reactions of those around them.

The origins of fiction were more akin to tabletop roleplaying games: a collaborative process, where the storyteller may change their story slightly depending on how others are responding to them.

That is extrinsic motivation. A storyteller wants to keep their audience engaged because the audience is directly in front of them. It feels good to share a story with people you know, who you can see, who may pat your back at the end of your tale and say they loved it. It’s the reason I enjoyed roleplaying when I was younger.

But writers are not guaranteed that audience. We may never meet or hear from those who read our stories. They probably won’t leave a review anyway. So, unlike the storytellers huddled around prehistoric campfires, we can’t rely on audience reactions. We have to tell stories for ourselves foremost because we have no clue who our audience is.

We can use Theory of Mind to imagine our ideal audience and then tailor our marketing to them. However, this is only a guess. The real, live people who interact with your work may be completely different.

For example, I thought my books would be popular with gay men … but most of my readership is fujoshis. Go figure.

If you want to share your stories with a greater audience than your five friends, then you have to vanquish your urge for praise.

Accept that readers don’t care about you.

OP’s ultimate curse here is they want the audience to care about them. That’s the whole problem with extrinsic motivation, and thus perfectionism.

We can presume that they don’t just want other people to like their books, but to tell them the quotes were amazing, the themes perfect, etc, etc. Otherwise, why would it matter if people fell in love with their work? OP would never know, so it wouldn’t really matter.

Readers don’t care about you. Readers don’t want to think about you when they’re reading your stuff. You have produced something for their entertainment, not your gratification. The book shifts from a labor of love to a product: from satisfaction for the writer to satisfaction to the reader.

Here’s the funny thing: I would be utterly mortified if readers were thinking about me when reading my stuff. When people want to tell me in excruciating detail about how much they liked it, I speedwalk away. It feels too intimate, too weird.

Once, I even had a reader get into a super parasocial relationship with me. They literally “fell in love” with me through my fanfic and started to mold their life around things I referenced in my stories. This reader told me if I stopped writing, they’d have nothing to live for.

Not flattering! Bunny boiler! Scary! Go away!

Alas, that discomfort with acknowledgment is the paradox of publishing. My work has me all over it, but it also doesn’t. The finished product is out of my hands and the reader’s experience is all that matters.

The Redditor I argued with asked me why I bother publishing if it’s not for extrinsic satisfaction. I didn’t grace them with a response, but I’ll tell you because I like you.

I publish because I want other people to enjoy my work for their own sake – not because I want them to fawn over me. I want them to be happy about what they read, and I don’t care whether they tell me about it.

My requests for reviews doesn’t come from wanting to stroke my ego; it’s so more people can discover my books and like them. I want to ensure more readers have the opportunity to explore my work.

That’s a completely different framing, but one many refuse to accept.

I’m not a super special person who has achieved ultimate ego death and totally detached from human desire. At my core, I’m just like everyone else; no mystical enlightenment, no nirvana fast pass. So why can I perform this magic trick when others can’t?

The answer is because I enjoy the process of writing more than I enjoy getting attention for writing.

You have to enjoy the process or there’s no point.

If you don’t enjoy the process of writing, then don’t write.

I’m not saying you have to like every aspect of writing, mind. I certainly don’t. (Revisions. And marketing.)

But you have to like enough of it to put up with the parts you disdain.

The original post didn’t say anything about the joy of writing. There was no discussion of how fun it is to play in your own imaginary world, to plot, to create characters, to explore human nature, or even the excitement of learning something new. Everything OP said was about what they could get from other people liking what they wrote.

Frankly, it doesn’t seem like OP even likes writing. I wonder if a lot of perfectionists have the same issue. By worrying so much about what other people think, they don’t stop to consider if they enjoy anything but the finished result.

I like writing a lot. That should be clear by now. I wouldn’t have written over 8,100 words in a single day if I didn’t.

When I am in the thick of a draft, nothing matters but having fun with my characters, planning cool plots, finding the perfect description. I don’t think about whether anyone else will like it; that comes later. I like making it, which is the only crucial detail during the active writing phase.

If you find yourself gritting your teeth at the process of sitting down and making a story that no one else might ever read, this may suggest that you have too much extrinsic motivation and not enough intrinsic motivation.

During revisions, perfectionism is good because you have already determined that someone else will read this, and you want to offer them an amazing experience. During active writing, perfectionism is bad because it means you’re thinking too far ahead.

You’re not in the moment. You’re not being present with your writing. So you don’t get much done.

How to tackle writer’s perfectionism

The standard advice about perfectionism does not work for writers because, as I said before, I suspect it comes from a completely different source. The curse is external motivation and a desire for praise.

We need to tackle that first, and then maybe we can unwind the problem. Here is a hypothetical game plan to fix your perfectionism.

Write a poem you will never let anyone read upon pain of death. I’m serious. Create a piece that you know no one – not beta readers, not your friends, not your professors – will ever read. Commit to your promise. Never let anyone read it.

Do that a few times until you get bored.

Write a short story that you will never let anyone else read. Do this a few times.

Begin your million practice words. For the first 500,000, don’t let anyone read them right away. Polish them, play with them. Don’t tell anyone that you’re writing anything. You don’t need beta readers at this point because all of this is practice.

During this time, you should also be reading as widely as you can and studying craft through free resources.

Now, start on your next 250,000 words. These you will share with people – but under a pseudonym. You could put your silly tales on Archive of Our Own, publish them on an anonymous forum, whatever. Make sure that it’s not tied to your real name. The goal is to divorce yourself from the satisfaction of having people know who you are. If you decide you like something from your first 500,000, then put them up somewhere.

For your next 250,000 words, you’ll share them with people under your real name. You could share them with friends, join a writer’s group, or start a website. By now, you should have developed some intrinsic motivation. This will help you determine whether you genuinely enjoy writing or merely want attention.

Now you’ve done 1 million practice words! Congrats! You could be on the cusp of publishing. Devote more attention to your next projects. Get feedback. Consider the audience.

Many younger writers hate the Golden Million Word Rule. They yell at me every time I suggest it, saying I’m gatekeeping and elitist or whatever. If they already self-published, they get defensive and think I’m saying their work is shit. Work that I have never read and probably never will.

How is it elitist to say you should write stuff? You can write a million words, even if it takes you 10 years. Anyone can do that if they feel like it.

If you enjoy writing, then a million words is nothing. For me, that milestone flew by in about a year.

But if you don’t actually enjoy writing for the sake of writing – if you primarily enjoy the attention that comes from it – then the million word rule will seem like torture.

That, my friend, tells you everything you need to know about where your true motivation lies. And you need to fix that. And my potential game plan will help.

Okay, I’ll be real with you. I didn’t follow this pattern. Instead, I wrote 1.6 million words of fanfic under a pseudonym: Topazadine, which has no connection to my real name. The only people who saw it were random Touken Ranbu fans – and you, I suppose, if you go look it up.

Yes, I did get some external validation, but I knew that no one who read it cared about me; we were bonding over our mutual love of the characters. Nobody in my real life knew I was doing all of this because they don’t care about Touken Ranbu.

I also knew that attention was never guaranteed, and I was writing because I like the characters. I wanted to explore them more and play with them, just as I play with the characters in the Eirenic Verses.

Not only did this validate what I already knew – that I like writing – but it also helped demolish any ego I might have had about people breathlessly running up to me, squealing their praise.

I have said it before, and I’ll say it again, as many times as necessary.

Ego is one of the most dangerous poisons for a writer.

It is ego that makes people publish early, makes them defensive about negative feedback, and causes them to blow up at people who are only trying to help them see their cognitive distortions.

And yes, it can keep them from bothering to write at all. Perfectionism in writers is because they care too much about what others think. An obsession with audience attention (important distinction) creates boring, derivative work that sounds like every other mass-market book on the planet. Yawn.

So please, for your own sake, stop caring about everyone else. It’s very unlikely that you’ll make a living wage from your work, especially as a self-published author. The joy and satisfaction must come from within. Otherwise, you’ll never publish at all.