Good enough

On Monday I was commiserating with a businessman friend about the miserable state of the economy, the dismal job market, the Packers winning the Superbowl (because he cares, not because I do), and various other usual topics, when he mentioned in passing that he couldn’t find the right person to fill a particular job opening. I expressed surprise; given the vast numbers of people who are currently looking, it seemed to me like a buyer’s market. We talked a bit more, and finally the lightbulb came on.

“Oh,” I said, “you want somebody who is really anal-retentive for that position, right?”

He thought for a minute, then shook his head. “Not quite. I need somebody who is anal-retentive about the right things. Somebody who can tell when ‘just good enough’ is good enough, and when it’s time to get picky about even the tiniest flakes of dust.”

At which point, it occurred to me that part of the problem with writing is just exactly that: knowing when to be picky about the right things. It doesn’t do a bit of good to polish a paragraph until every word in it shines if there’s a serious problem with the scene or the chapter.

The trouble is, it’s a lot easier for most writers to sort out microwriting problems than it is to find and fix problems at the macro level. To some extent, this is because the only way you can fix a writing problem is on the micro level. The events of the first six chapters may be happening in the wrong order, but a big part of making the fix is changing words and phrases: “February” to “August,” “stamping snow from their boots” to “scraping mud off their shoes” and so on.

This makes it very easy to lose focus – to get so caught up in changing the winter day to a summer one that one forgets why one was changing it. The point isn’t to stuff in as many references to weather and the time of year as possible; the point is to give the events of the particular scene a new context. It’s not about simply changing the venue from February to August; it’s about the way the action flows from one scene to the next, and the way information gets fed to the readers and to the characters.

Some writers do this by alternating rapidly between a close-up focus  (“what words do I need in this sentence?”) and a big picture focus (“how is moving this scene going to change the overall pace and flow of the story? Is changing this sentence going to help or hurt?”). Some writers lay out the big picture very carefully before they start revising, then dive into the microwriting, secure in the knowledge that They Have A Plan. And some writers appear to be multitasking geniuses who can hold both things in their heads at once.

However you do it, the important thing is to make sure that whatever changes you make work on both the microwriting level and the macrowriting level.