I mean, any book you write should be great, but it doesn’t have to be perfect. That’s arguably the biggest hang-up that stops people from putting a book out there in the world. “It has to be perfect, and then I’ll publish it.” Well, in the days of traditional publishing, the standards were a lot higher if you wanted to stand a chance of seeing your book in print, but now that you can go to Lulu.com or other comparable self-publication companies, that’s just not a good excuse any more.

The perfectionist mentality often rears its ugly head during the writing process. I hear people say this over and over: “I can’t stop myself from editing while I write.” If you try to do a book this way, you’ll doom yourself to perpetual refinement mode. I now allow myself to fix spelling errors as I go (it’s just more efficient that way), but I have an unbreakable canon of writing that I stick to: NO editing until at least 24 hours have elapsed.

I also have learned that even when I do get something “perfect” by my own standards, it doesn’t always meet with the enthusiastic response I was anticipating. Over-perfecting a book can actually have the opposite effect; what’s left of your manuscript that’s survived your editing process might have lost the core message that would have interested a reader the most.  There’s no way to predict the effect a book will have on its readers, of course, so the best way to handle this is to start sending out pieces of it and see what people come back with.

Don’t worry about getting it perfect. Just get it done and get it out there.

I’ve noticed that writing projects are naturally prone to scope creep, much more so than other types of projects, for a number of reasons. Writers are too creative, thinking up too many new ideas at a time; that’s the biggest factor leading to scope creep. But also, we’ve got plenty of stories, and we love standing up on our soapboxes. It seems inevitable, during any writing project, that we’ll be confronted with the tough decision of what to include and what not to include. Blogs are even worse, because they’re written day by day with no pre-defined structure.

I’ve decided that it’s time to contain the scope creep of my own blog, right here. I’ve tried a lot of different things, and I see that this is getting me nowhere. I also notice that the overwhelming mountain of possible topics to blog about leaves me disempowered, and less motivated to blog about anything at all. So, it’s time to put in some focus. From now on, this blog will be focused solely on my core business: writing and editing.

Something else I’ve noticed, when it comes to putting the lid on the scope creep beast, is that two heads are better than one. I’ve found that during client projects, I need to reel the client back in from time to time (or, sometimes, they need to do it for me). Left to my own devices, I’ll drift off into nowhere land.That’s why I’ve decided to make it a priority to make this more interactive.

I would appreciate if anyone would comment on issues you’ve faced with project scope creep, particularly related to writing projects, and what you’ve done to address it.