Aiming for Perfection

I’m going to warn you. This is going to get pretty nerdy. I’m almost scared to post this. Please if you’ve never been to this site, read a few other posts before making any judgments. :)

I’m writing this anyway despite my reservations because I think it is something that needs to be said even if my way of saying it is a little nerdy.

On the writing sites I frequent, I hear this advice a lot. Write the story, do an editing pass or two, then submit it, and start writing the next story. Don’t spend too much time revising a story, you learn faster by writing a new stories. I want it to be clear right now, I do think this is good advice for many writers. You can get trapped in endless revisions and editing, and the more stories you write, the better you will get. This definitely can lead to success, as I’m sure it has.

BUT…..

What if you feel strongly about the story? What if you can see its flaws and know how to fix them? What if you really really believe in it, know it has the potential to be publishable, but it isn’t quite there yet?

Should you send it out, give up on it, and move on? Or is it worth putting a little more work into it, rewriting, revising, and editing until you’ve done the best you can, even if it takes months or years?

I think sometimes when you have a story you really believe in, you can’t give up on it. Kathryn Stockett the bestselling author of The Help didn’t even after sixty rejections from agents, and her family and friends urging her to write something else. She believed in the book, and she kept working on it. It took her five years to finish it, but it turned out to be a best seller. J.R.R. Tolkien spent ten years writing The Lord of the Rings, and we all know how successful that story was.

But it is hard to know when you fall into the trap of eternal revision and editing. Like Leonardo da Vince said, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.”

So how do you know when you should abandon your art?

Okay so here is the nerdy part.

I am a science geek and love graphs and stuff. So this is my theoretical graph (there is no data to support this) of editing and/or revising. While there is no data to support my theoretical graph, this is how, from my limited experiences, revisions and editing seems to go for me.

I “plotted” the quality of the manuscript (y-axis) versus the effort put in (x-axis). Please bear with me. I spent way too much time on this graph, but if you simply can’t stomach it, you can go to the asterisk at the end.*

The straight line across the graph labeled perfection is called an asymptote which means, for you non-nerds, that the curved blue line will never reach the perfection line. You can put an infinite amount of effort into a story and it will never reach perfection. You will inch closer and closer to it, but you will never reach it.

Now indulge me a little and look at the curved blue line. In the beginning (which I labeled A) the quality of the work increases greatly with just a little effort. See how steeply the curve rises at the beginning. This is when you are fixing those plot wholes, adding depth to characterization, cutting and rearranging scenes. A little (relative) effort dramatically increases the quality.

At region B, it starts to slow down. A lot more work has to go into it to see a change in quality. Notice how the curve is rounding at B. This is when the storyline is solid, and you are working on the finer editing; doing line by lines, polishing the writing, fixing the grammar sentence by sentence. It is a lot of work, and it does increase the quality, but it takes a lot more effort to do so.

Now you can fiddle endlessly with line edits. If you are staring at the same sentence for twenty minutes, taking out words just to put them back in, dithering on every word choice, you’ve reached region C where the curve is essentially a flat line with little or no change in quality despite tons of effort being done. This is where you can edit forever with very little or no significant change in your story. This is where you need to stop.

But honestly, why would you abandon your story when you are in the A or even B region? Where you can make dramatic increases in quality with little relative effort?

I think it is easy to impatient with writing. If you are like me, you have shiny new ideas piling up while you are writing, and they try to lure you away from your editing. It’s tempting to move on.

But if you really believe in the story, don’t you want to give it the best shot it has of reaching an audience?

The book industry, whether you go the traditional route or self-publish, is very competitive. I just don’t know how I can hope to succeed unless I’m submitting my very best work.

Now I’m not saying you should do this for every story. Some stories need to be abandoned earlier especially if you are not excited about it anymore or it is essentially unfixable. Nor am I saying that my way is the only way.

But sometimes there are stories that burn inside you that you really need to tell, those are the ones that you should not give up on, that you should at least aim for perfection.

Honestly, those are the only ones I want to write.

~MaryAnn

*If you really can’t stand graphs, my overall point is, at some point in editing, you are spending a lot of time fiddling with the words, but are not significantly changing the overall quality of the story. Once you’ve reached that point, that is when you abandon your story and send it out into the cold, cold world.

Stubbornness

 Work on the volcano/demon story continues.  I've worked through most (but not all) of the large questions of the story, and have moved on to Serious Outlining Phase.  Still some character work to do with the villain, but I remain optimistic at the moment about my chances of completion, and the story as a whole.

Distraction remains a problem. I keep coming up with new ideas to try to get myself to 1)settle down, 2) start writing, 3) keep writing.  Over the years I've been writing, I've come up with a dozen ideas to get myself to sit down and concentrate.  But no technique works for long.

In that way, my mind is kind of like the Borg. I think up one way to avoid distractions, and it works for a while. But soon, the brain develops resistance, and then suddenly starships are exploding and I'm back to watching YouTube videos of baby birds.

 PERSISTENCE IS FUTILE

That's a form a flightiness, but for me, it's usually stubbornness that gets in the way of the creative process. For one, I can get very, very attached to particular words or phrases.  You know, the ones that appear late at night when I've had several cups of tea* and too little sleep.  They can be very lovely words, but when I catch myself wanting to keep a scene in because of one or two great sentences, it's time to let go.

And then there are those scenes that just don’t work.  I do undergo several stages of outlining, and can get very used to the way a certain scene fits in the story, and am thus reluctant to let it go, even if it's not working outt.  It took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize that if I have trouble writing a scene, it generally means the scene is boring, and that there is room for improvement.  If I'm not excited to write a scene, why should it even be in there?   But sometimes I've been working on the scene long enough that I can't envision any other way for the story to progress.  In those cases, I make myself list the goals of the scene.  Usually, there's only one or two, and with a little brainstorming, I'm awash in new ideas for how the scene could change and improve. 

Despite those solutions, I still have problems with stubbornness.  I can be especially slow to adopt new ideas and techniques, no matter how rational they might seem on paper.  But eventually, I do get it.  So what's taking so long?

Sometimes I visualize my subconscious as being made up of complex steampunk-style machinery.  When that excellent new idea is rejected by my stubborn conscious brain, it gets tossed behind the hamsters on wheels running my daily thoughts and goes into a little bucket.  The bucket slowly disappears up into that complex machinery.  There, I can only assume that it has to progress through some lengthy path filled with lots of bells and whistles and gears and pulleys. And possibly more hamsters on wheels.

Finally, out of nowhere, the idea will reappear, and suddenly it will seem the most fantastic thing ever.  And then I'll start exclaiming about this idea, and my friends will be all, yeah we told you about that six months ago.

There's probably a lot of ideas rattling around up there right now, making their way slowly through my subconscious, and taking up the important brain machinery that would otherwise allow me to recall where I put my keys.

Not  that stubbornness is an entirely bad thing.  It keeps me going when I'm down, and when I want to give up because a deadline is only 18 days away.  Nope, my stubborn brain says.  Can't give up now.  You want this too much.

Maybe it's not such a bad thing after all.

*Tea is definitely my writing brew of choice.  I discovered long ago that anything over one glass of wine = terrible writing and zero ideas.  It was rather comforting to know that I wasn't going to end up like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, writing my most famous work only after a drug binge**.

**Not actually comparing self or writing skills to Coleridge