“Aiming for perfection is what causes people to stay stuck.” –Alice Boyes
My brother recently took a class in gem-cutting. When he finished, he told me that a “perfect” cut is a matter of magnification. What looks perfect to the naked eye is a bit off when you crank up the magnification, and it gets worse and worse the closer you look. Of course, that level of magnification also allows you to fix the flaw…until you crank it up another notch. The catch is, after a certain point, even the most expert gem-cutter can’t spot those “flawed” places without a microscope. Professional gem-cutters stop refining their work at the point where they can’t tell the difference without magnifying it more than once. Because they know it is never going to be perfect, not if they increase the magnification one more step, and they don’t have the time to chase an impossibility.
Perfectionism is a killer, no matter where you find it. (I got the above quote out of a Harvard Business Review article on being a better corporate manager.) But it is especially pernicious for people in the arts, obviously including writers.
The most obvious reason for this is one I’ve talked about before: The fact that what is “good” or “perfect” in art is nearly always a matter of subjective things like personal preference and taste. This becomes obvious if one looks at literature over time. Techniques that were once favored have gone out of fashion, like the deft slide from one person’s thoughts to another in omniscient (which some now look down on as “head-hopping”), or the various uses of the copulative verb “to be,” which often now get lumped under “passive voice” or “weak verbs.” Writing has its fashions, like everything else.
The less obvious problem is that getting something absolutely perfect is not always the best or most effective choice. By privileging “high quality” over every other consideration, one can end up with a perfect product that is useless for its intended purpose. If one is decorating a birthday cake, it generally matters more that the cake is finished in time for the celebration than that every leaf and rose and curlicue should finally be perfect three days after the party. Some materials are more forgiving than others. A chunk of marble or granite will wait forever for the sculptor to decide on the exact chisel-stroke, but if it isn’t right the first time, there’s no going back. Paint, on the other hand, can always be gone over, modified, or even erased.
Writing is one of the arts that can have it both ways, and therein lies the trap. A blank page will wait forever for the next sentence or word; one that’s been written and rewritten and polished can always be altered yet again. Writers can spend as much time as they like on either end of the process, or on both, so long as they have the time, the inclination, and some other means of support.
Which is fine … for some writers. Too many others, though, are chasing perfection because they think they should – and they get wrapped up in knots because there is no objective way to measure the perfectness of a piece of writing. You can’t simply count the number of adverbs and assert that “The band played” is a better sentence than “The band played badly” in the same way that “He crept” is probably a better sentence than “He crept softly.” (How does one creep, if not softly? But I add the “probably” because I can think of times when that adverb might be necessary, not for meaning, but for the rhythm of the sentence, or as part of a parallel structure. Context matters.)
One of the things that tends to happen when one is chasing perfection is that after a while, one’s vision becomes noticeably blurry. That sentence on page 73 – how many times has it been rewritten? Do I dare look back at the first draft, in case the latest change is just putting it back where it started? That paragraph about the goldfish bowl … I know I moved it a couple of times, but which chapter is it in now … and did I accidentally leave a reference to it in an earlier chapter, before it was ever mentioned?
So the writer goes hunting for fresh eyes – beta readers who can spot things the writer has looked at too many times to see clearly. This is, again, a good and useful thing. But when a writer is chasing perfection, critique takes on more significance. After all, if the work were perfect, they wouldn’t find anything to comment on, would they? Some writers then begin giving more and more of their work the side-eye, because A didn’t like the plot twist about the grandmother, B didn’t think the carnations were thematically consistent, C wanted a two-page character description summarizing each character’s appearance and backstory when they made their first appearance in the story, even if the first time they showed up was in the middle of a gunfight, and D thinks that one of the secondary characters is much more interesting than the main character, and wants the whole story to be rewritten with him as the viewpoint.
If the writer can focus on making their story better, they can give each of these comments the consideration it deserves. A has issues with their family that may be making them more sensitive to the grandmother twist, which means the writer doesn’t cut it entirely, but A is right that it’s a bit awkward and needs work. B’s ideas about the carnations are totally out in left field. C’s idea would slow the pace to a crawl, but it may be worth trying to get at least a few descriptive details in besides the character’s name … and oops, there’s that guy who doesn’t even have a name until four pages after his entrance; til then he’s just “the man.” D wants the story they would have written, which is not the one the writer is writing, so no, the POV character doesn’t change and neither does the plot.
If, however, the writer is chasing perfection, it’s often hard to see which suggestions and remarks deserve to trigger changes and which ones can safely be ignored. The writer knows their judgement is shot, that they’ve looked at this thing too long to really see what’s there, and not just what they want to be there. In this mindset, it’s perilously easy to take everyone else’s opinion as cold, hard truth. In trying to satisfy everyone (by taking out the grandmother and the carnations, adding pages of character introduction, and changing the viewpoint character and the whole plot along with him), the writer ends up with an obvious mess, and instead of reaching perfection, has to begin another round of “fixing.”
Perfection is unobtainable in this imperfect world, and high quality is not achieved by committee.
Am I the only writer who’s more prone to leaving the text alone even if it probably would benefit from a bit of refining than to endlessly tinkering whether it’s helping or not? (I know I’m not, but it does seem like we’re a small minority.)
Learning to judge what feedback to take on board and what to disregard may well be the hardest lesson a writer has to learn. I mostly do it by gut instinct, but sometimes it’s taken me six months to be able to articulate why a certain suggestion wouldn’t work. Hmm, maybe a future blog post on tips and tricks for making that call?
I generally write a clean first draft, so I’m not inclined to tinker endlessly with the prose in revision. I do make some changes, generally for clarity, occasionally for thematic resonance.
But most of my changes involve adding material—a sentence to convey what a character was thinking or feeling, a scene that should have been included but wasn’t, even a chapter. Most of my sins are those of omission. There’s some of the story that was in my head that didn’t get onto the page. Sometimes I simply make a mistake that must be corrected (like when, in my latest release, I had a character dragged by an enemy who was mounted, and that…just didn’t work; so I changed it).
There’s some of the story that was in my head that didn’t get onto the page.
Ah, I have found my tribe. 🙂
I too write pretty clean first drafts, and if I have to do (what I consider) major revisions, it’s usually putting in something that I thought but for some reason didn’t type.
I’ll make changes if my alpha-reader flags something, or if I know there’s a weak spot that’s niggling, but once I declare a story “done”, I almost never have the impulse to tinker with it. I’ve actually had stories drop off my radar entirely once I finished them — which is a problem if one intends to submit for publication.
😀 There are a few of us.
I have two first readers who I hand my manuscript off to sequentially. Both are excellent; I’m grateful to have them! One of them flagged the horse-dragging issue this time. Each of them has said, “I think you are missing a scene” at various points (on different books) in the past.
Yes! When reading one of my older works (not quite sure what prompted that, but there I was), it felt like someone else had written it, because I’d forgotten a lot of it. I’ll confess I was enjoying the read. 😉
Your blog is as enjoyable to read as your books are! I just love your writing! Could please share your thoughts on shaping a good story / balancing the form, particularly across a series? I am in the process of writing my first book and would appreciate your thoughts on the arc of a story, particularly across multiple books.
“That sentence on page 73 – how many times has it been rewritten.”
I had a boss once whose problem that was. He didn’t write fiction; he was a political scientist and was writing a paper for a journal that was *already* past its due date when I came on board as a typist. He would give me the paper, with (mostly) minor corrections. I’d make the changes, print it out, and give it back to him. He’d give it back with more changes, repeat from asterisk.
He got to the point where there were half-a-dozen phrases in it that continually (as one would say of electronic circuits) “hunted” back and forth between version A and version B. I had more than a month of this, THANK GOD FOR COMPUTERS RUNNING UNIX!!! — and then he asked me to come on as a full-time hire.
I came near to a nervous breakdown, because MONEY! but on the other hand, HUNTING! I woke up from a nightmare one morning, went to work, and told him No thanks. I got another assignment and I don’t know to this day if he ever finished that paper and I don’t care.
I gotta say…good for you! You’re setting me an excellent example.
Of course it’s entirely possible to err the other way too – I’m sure we’ve all read books that “feel like first draft”, the sloppy ones that could have used another (or even a first) read-through-and-fix.
And I suspect that the location of the happy medium varies not only by writer but also by book.
My rule of thumb is that if I’m not sick of reading the book yet it’s not ready.
I had an “aha!” moment a day or two ago; one of the problems I’ve been having with my WIP is not getting the first chapter right. (And in hindsight this was a problem with my previous novels, too.) This caused me to bog down and get stuck due to “you took a wrong turn, earlier, and need to fix that before you continue.”
I had been resisting this; I’d been overcompensating to avoid the traps of “perfectionism” and of writing the first chapter over and over and over again. But the first chapter does need to be, if not “perfect,” then better than the rest. Or else it’s harder to make chapter 1 just as good as chapters 2+. In either case, I do need to accept that chapter 1 will need more rewriting and fiddling around than the rest of the book.