I would never call myself a perfectionist. In fact, my family would probably fall over laughing at that description. But perhaps I’m really what I like to call a “reverse perfectionist”, meaning I often won’t start a project if I don’t think I can get it 100% correct the first time. Maybe it’s just a fear of failure, but whatever I call it—it’s PROCRASTINATION! And when I put that self-imposed limit on my writing, I end up with a blank page. And here’s a little inside secret; writers can’t revise something that hasn’t been written!

I have been reading Ann Whitford Paul’s excellent book, Write Picture Books: A Hands-On Guide from Story Creation to Publication, and I’ve found it to be very inspirational. She gives some excellent advice on page 11:

“Remember, your first draft will rarely be ready to submit to an editor. Just as milk needs churning to become ice cream, your draft will need revision to become publishable. Get your story down and you’ll have something to work with.”

Those words make me ask myself—how much am I churning? How about you?

To overcome my tendencies to be a reverse-perfectionist writer, I’ve found the following tips and strategies to be very helpful:

1. Just Do It – Just get your ideas down on paper without stopping to analyze or make corrections. Turn off the inner editor and don’t stem the flow.

2. Junk Is Okay – Even if you think what you write is worthless junk, it’s better to get it on paper and discard it later than not write at all. Writing needs to become a habit. Besides, once the process is started, it’s easier to keep the momentum going. And the longer you write, the better chance you’ll have of writing something you can revise.

3. A Timer Is Your Friend – When I’m really in a bad reverse perfectionism slump, I can set the timer for fifteen minutes and tell myself that I can do anything for that short amount of time. Usually however, those fifteen minutes turn into a much longer writing session. Once again, momentum is the key. But if a time crunch is the problem…

4. Bits and Pieces Add Up – Some writers don’t want to tackle a writing project unless they have a large chunk of time to devote to it. However, I’m a busy wife and homeschool mom, and I know from experience that little bits of writing time here and there do add up over time. It’s not the ideal scenario, but ten or fifteen minutes throughout the day can equal a couple of hours of writing time. And that doesn’t include the ‘thinking time’ when I’m in between tasks. It can be done.

5. Have a Writing Day/Night – One night a week, my family graciously allows me to slip away to the library for a few hours of writing time. This hasn’t always been an option for me, but it’s a luxury I’m able to enjoy now since my youngest children aren’t babies anymore. Because I know I’m ‘on the clock’ I can really buckle down and get some serious writing done—I make it count! Actually, I think it’s called focus!

6. Someday May Never Come – Today is the day! If I let my reverse perfectionism take over by waiting until ‘someday’ when I will have more time or feel I can turn out a masterpiece on the first try—that ‘someday’ will probably never come. I will have a bunch of blank pages in a notebook or empty files in my computer.

I have to keep reminding myself that anything I write is better than nothing at all. I tell my inner reverse perfectionist voice that a few words become a sentence, and a few sentences become a paragraph. Several paragraphs become a page, and pages become a manuscript. With this mentality, the pages will add up. No, my work won’t be perfect or 100% complete, but at least I’ll have material that I can craft, edit, revise and polish into something special.

*This is an article I previously published over the National Writing for Children Center.

It’s so true—ideas are everywhere. As writers, we are constantly on the lookout for grist for our writing mills that we can use to develop into articles or stories. We search the world wide web. We use information from our lives, jobs and careers. We sift back through our own memories from childhood, and much to our children’s dismay, we may even play off humorous things they say and do. We are persistent and consistent in our quest to mine for those little nuggets and ideas that we will make uniquely ours.

However, one fantastic source for ideas may be so obvious that it’s simply overlooked. In fact, until I started thinking back on how I originally came up with the ideas for some of my published non-fiction articles, I too had forgotten about my ‘secret source’—my children’s schoolwork! For example, when my twin daughters were studying about westward expansion in America, I checked out a video about the Oregon Trail from the library. As we were watching the documentary, the narrator commented that the Oregon Trail is the nation’s longest graveyard. If the graves were evenly spaced along the length of the Trail, there would be one every fifty yards from Missouri to Oregon City. Light bulb moment! My interest was piqued, and I began to research. The result was an article entitled “The Oregon Trail: Destiny or Death?” that was published in Learning Through History Magazine.

The same thing happened when my children studied about ancient Rome, ancient Greece, the Great Depression, the French Revolution, and World War I, all resulting in the following articles:

Roman Baths: Ancient Health Clubs

Eureka! Archimedes and His Accomplishments

Herbert Hoover: From Prosperity to Depression

Tragedy In the Temple Prison

A Deadly Cloud of Poison Gas

When my daughters were very young, they learned about various animals during one particular unit study. We became fascinated with the leaf eating proboscis monkeys of Borneo which led me to write an article called “Snoots and Snouts” for Guideposts for Kids, a piece about funny animal noses. This came on the heels of another article called “Power In A Bottle” that I sold to Jack and Jill after teaching a class of second graders about the chemical reaction of mixing baking soda and vinegar to create carbon dioxide.

I once heard a podcast featuring children’s author Kathi Appelt (“The Book Report” 6/25/08). She said that she found her inspiration for writing her non-fiction book, Down Cut Shin Creek: Pack Horse Librarians of Kentucky when she was helping her ninth grade son with his research for a paper about the WPA. As she was scanning various websites for information about the WPA, she came across a site called the “Kentucky Pack Horse Library Project.” According to Appelt in another interview conducted by Cynthia Leitich Smith:

“It wasn’t anything that Jacob could use, but with my life-long affection for all-things-horse I bookmarked the page and returned to it a couple of days later. Then I contacted the webmaster who turned out to be Jeanne Cannella Schmitzer, a librarian in Cookville, TN and we started corresponding with each other.

“One day, she invited me to come with her to Beattyville, KT to interview a woman named Grace Lucas who had been one of these librarians. Of course, I jumped at the chance, and both of us just fell in love with Grace and her story. I felt so touched and impressed with Grace’s life and the impact that she and her co-workers made on the lives of so many people, that the book was almost inevitable.”

I loved the way Appelt said, “…the book was almost inevitable!” And due to helping her son with the homework assignment that led her to find a website that inspired to her write her book, the ripples of Kathi Appelt’s discovery continue even further. When another children’s author, Kimberly Willis Holt, saw a picture in Appelt’s book of a bookmobile librarian who worked in a Louisiana bayou community, she was inspired to write her fictional book, Part of Me! I’ve read both of these ladies’ books, and they are exceptional. Thank goodness for that research paper on the WPA!

So the next time you need to help your child with schoolwork, don’t think of it as a chore or an inconvenience. Yes, it is a labor of love, but also consider it an opportunity—an opportunity to mine for writer’s gold. You never know when that perfect nugget of information will turn up to spark your creative interest and lead to greater success in your writing career.