Get On With It

Perfection is a goal best suited for brain surgeons and rocket scientists, and even they kill a few people and blow off a digit or two before they gain the respect of their peers.

Allow me to share a cautionary tale. 

For twenty years, I wanted to write a murder mystery. Occasionally, between the years of 1990 and 2010, I actually tried to write a murder mystery, yet all I had to show for my efforts were a handful of loosely related chapters that I would write, stick in a drawer, throw away, misplace, rewrite, and repeat. And why? Because I was deathly afraid of my book not being perfect. How humiliating would it be to write a murder mystery only to have people laugh at it, or at me, because it wasn't as good as a Hammett, or a Chandler, or an Elroy? My book had to be flawless. There was no way I could even consider writing the next chapter if the current chapter wasn't chiseled to perfection. So I piddled away, on and off, now and again, for half my life at that point and ended up with absolutely nothing to show for it.

Now, there were more reasons than merely an ill-guided pursuit of perfection that kept me from seriously attempting a novel. Insecurity was probably the greatest of them all, but it all feeds together into a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. The unattainability of perfection can be an insecure person's ultimate excuse for not committing to the task at hand.

Once I stopped whining -- and more importantly, once I came out of the literary closet and announced to the world (and my wife) that I wanted to write a book -- the excuses melted away. That didn't make writing my first book any easier. Nothing about writing a novel is easy. After three years of hard work, with some days resulting in negative word count, I finished my masterpiece and it sucked. Don't think I didn't know it sucked, either. I knew halfway through the rough draft that, as a murder mystery, as a work of fiction, as a thing between a front and back cover, it really and most genuinely achieved a groundbreaking level of awfulness. 

But that's okay. I got it out of my system and discovered it wasn't the only thing I wanted to write. There were other characters and other stories jostling for attention in my head that would never have shown up if I hadn't knocked out that first book and gotten it out of the way.