[Tweet “One of the worst enemies of a writer is the need to produce perfect art.”]
Of course we want to produce perfect art. It is, after all, what we’re sending out into the world, and we can’t just send something out that has glaring mistakes and smells of poor execution and looks like a 5-year-old got a wild hair. Of course we will try our hardest to make something beautiful and legendary. Of course we will do everything we possibly can to make sure the world notices and agrees, Yes. This is good.
We’ll spend days that turn into weeks that turn into years revising and touching up and fixing this one little thing right here because it’s still not quite right, still not quite perfect. But the reality is, if we want to move forward in our writing career, we are going to have to put a stopping point somewhere. We are eventually going to have to launch our writing out into the world.
Don’t get me wrong. Revision is a grand thing. I love revision, even though it takes me much longer to revise than it does to simply write. But if all we ever do is revise until that old story we felt so passionately about is lost under this newer, maybe-better-maybe-not story, we won’t be moving anywhere. We will stagnate. We will be writers with thousands of unfinished manuscripts we never had the courage to stamp “finished” on.
I know writers who have been sitting on manuscripts for years, because they’re still revising. They’re afraid of letting a public see something that they think is imperfect. They’re afraid of good enough.
The thing is, most to the authors who actually make a living at this writing thing launch projects that are good enough. And most of the writers I know (including myself) look back at their earlier work and can point to every single thing they would change to make it better now. We are always growing an evolving and improving as writers, which means that what we produce today is much different than what we will produce five years from now.
[Tweet “We have to let our works of art go. We have to let them out into the world. They are good enough.”]
There is something fantastically beautiful about looking back at earlier works and marking the evolution of our lives as writers, how much we have grown and changed and (hopefully) improved over the years. We’ll never be able to do that if we’re hiding our half-finished manuscripts in a file cabinet or a secret drawer or in a buried box out back. We have to write “The End.”
Here’s how I like to think of it: The world is not served by our hidden manuscripts. But it can be served by our good enough manuscripts. I know it’s scary. Sending a book out into the world is one of the most vulnerable things we can do, because sometimes it isn’t received well, and we aren’t sure what we’ll do if it’s not. And sometimes people don’t even care, so it just sits on shelves and gathers dust and no one ever picks it up to see if what’s inside might resonate with their deepest places. And sometimes we can see every single part where we would have changed a word or a sentence or a plot line mere days after publication, proof that we probably weren’t ready for this and shouldn’t have done it in the first place, until we had fixed that one thing.
The truth is, we’re always going to find something that needs fixing in our manuscripts. I’ve launched three books into the world now, and I don’t even want to go back and read them, not yet, because I know that what I’ll find will make me want to take them off the market, and I can’t do that as a writer. I have to be moving forward. The only way I can move forward is to publish.
I have to be okay with good enough.
This need to produce perfect art will keep us from writing faster, and I believe that the faster we write, the closer we will find ourselves to our true “voice” and not someone else’s we’re imitating (which makes it harder to write, too). We’re not overthinking things when we’re writing fast. And the faster we write, the less likely it is that our internal editor will hijack all our progress. It’s a forward-motion cycle that can also turn into a downward spiral, if we let that perfection-demanding voice in.
It’s important to produce good art, but it’s not so important that we don’t let ourselves just get that crappy draft out. Revision is a magical process, when all the random words become better-aligned words, a collection of paragraphs and pass that look like it could really be SOMETHING. Sometimes it doesn’t take much to make it pretty and finished. Sometimes it takes more work than we ever thought it would, because some stories are harder to tell than others. But the point is that even those stories that take a lot of work could demand a whole life of work, until we put a stopping point on what we’re doing.
If we’re overthinking, trying too hard to be perfect, all we’re really doing is killing the story. We’re trying too hard. Most of us intuitively know how stories work. Most of us know how to tell them in an effective way.
So we should trust ourselves to do it.
How to let go of the need to produce perfect art
1. Set yourself a deadline.
Sometimes it helps to know that the project has an ending date, that you must have all your writing done by the end of that deadline. I usually give myself a month or so to write the rough draft, depending on my projected word count. And then I give myself no more than three months to turn that rough into a final draft, because I know if I give myself more time than that, I’ll overthink it. My art isn’t that great when I’m overthinking.
Deadlines can work in many different ways. You can set an actual date—March 31, 2016, say. Or you can set a deadline like “no more than 30 days.” Whatever works for you.
2. Read a story critically.
Mary Karr, a memoirist, claims that what has helped her become a better writer is examining the writings of other memoirists. She keeps a reading journal where she copies passages and writes commentary about places she likes or techniques that were effective. When we train ourselves to start reading this way, we’ll also notice the places that stick out as don’t-like passages. The discipline of analyzing other people’s stories will help us more quickly analyze our own. Stories also help deepen the pool of story inspiration, giving us all kinds of resources to draw from.
3. Ban perfectionism.
I know it’s hard. I’m a closet perfectionist, and right before a book launch, I always hear the same voice telling me it’s not good enough. It’s not even good.
Perfectionism will drive us crazy. We have to loosen its grip on our throats, because it will not serve us in any way. It will only set up unrealistic expectations, and it will show us how to improve our work until the very end of time. We’ll never move forward if we’re constantly looking back.
4. Put down the red pen.
It sure is tempting to go back and look at a manuscript “one more time,” but if you find yourself sneaking back to them, give yourself a number of drafts. If it’s not fixed by this particular draft, then that’s it. That’s all you get. Limiting the number of tries we have helps us to just let it go.
5. Launch and move on.
Let your project do its work. Let it shine for a couple of days. And then get started on your next work, because it will most likely be better than the last.
