Perfection: the graveyard of ideas

When I opened an app on my iPhone this morning to check my to-do list for the day, this quote by Voltaire popped up.

“The perfect is the enemy of the good.”

Yes, it’s a smartphone, but how did it know what I needed to hear today?

Writers should chant this line from Voltaire every time they sit down at their desks. I don’t know about the rest of you, but there is this harpy in my head who is always nagging, “Don’t you dare write that sentence down until you’re 100 percent absolutely positively certain that it’s the most perfect sentence anyone has ever written in the entire history of literature.”

And since perfection does not exist—not for me, not for you, not even for Shakespeare or the entire winners’ list of the Nobel, Pulitzer, and Newbery awards combined—when I make the mistake of listening to that harpy, nothing gets written.

Old Calton Cemetery in Edinburgh, Scotland
(c) Infrared photo by Nancy Butts

The poet Sylvia Plath wrote this in her poem “The Munich Mannequins.”

Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.
Cold as snow breath, it tamps the womb...

The quixotic quest for perfection in our work does indeed “tamp the womb,” keeping us from writing stories that may not be perfect, but are good enough nonetheless to inspire, delight, and transport readers.

The cure? Give yourself permission to write dreck, at least on that crucial first draft. What’s important is that you get the ideas out of you and safely onto the page. Those words and ideas are going to be far from perfect, but you’ll have plenty of time to make them better during revision. And that’s where most of the real work of writing gets done anyway.

So go write something awful today. 

[PS: I got so carried away with this topic that I couldn't keep from writing a longer article on this topic, with some suggestions for how to work around it. Jump over to my website for a peek.]

Poverty of ideas: the fifth kind of creative block

My friend Kristi Holl, whose book Boundaries for Writers I recently reviewed here, shared a fantastic article on her Facebook page about creative block.

Seven Types of Creative Block (and What to Do About Them)

Since I just spent three frustrating hours yesterday staring blankly at my keyboard, this couldn't have come at a better time. 

The author, Mark McGuiness, talks about seven different kinds of block. As a solitary writer, only six of them concern me, but I confess that at one time or another, all six have been a factor. Sigh!

It's Block #5 that intrigues me the most. McGuiness writes:

5. Poverty.

I’m not just talking about money, although a lack of cash is a perennial problem for creatives. You could also be time-poor, knowledge-poor [italics my emphasis], have a threadbare network, or be short of equipment or other things you need to get the job done.

I had never thought of poverty in these terms before, but I like that way of looking at creative block. I think it was my problem yesterday. When the roofers working next door started playing insanely loud, insanely obnoxious radio music yesterday, I had to flee. I  packed up my portable office and sought out the cool peace of the stacks in the college library. It was the first day of the summer session, and I swear I was the only patron in the entire library. It should have been writer heaven, right?

Wrong! I sat there for nearly three hours and didn't get a thing done. Well, not true. I revised the last chapter I had written in my middle grade novel, but I couldn't make any headway in the new chapter. I couldn't see what the characters were doing. I had poverty of ideas.

I think perhaps the problem for me is that I was in a space where I felt constrained physically. Is there such a thing as a kinesthetic writer? That seems to be what I am, because my daily walks always seem to kick my mind into gear. This morning on my walk, the first line of the chapter came to me, whole and complete. And I suddenly had a clear visual image of where my characters were. Of course, I've got a stack of manuscripts coming in this morning to be edited, so no writing for me, not today.

But I'll jot down that line, and maybe storyboard the chapter on some index cards. It's like depositing money in the bank, so that when I am able to sit down to write, I won't be idea-poor again.