Perfection

A friend of mine is a perfectionist. What makes it even worse, she is a poet and a novelist. She does not live very far from me and now that I am finally home I see her slaving away in her office not far from my house trying to find the perfect word for a perfect poem everyday. The last poem she wrote took a year for her to finish. Her first and only novel took her ten years to write. The good side to her work habits is she got her book published and it did well which is a good thing because she has been working on her second book since then and it is half finished and that was ten years ago.

My problem is what is written in my head is not what ends up on the page. I go round and round trying to put down what is between my ears on the computer screen and it never matches what I know is the real story. Sometimes, I give up and turn off the computer and go out for coffee or go hiking up at the lake. In Korea, I could not do that. I also could not find a book to read. Unless I wrote it, I did not find anything to read, so I wrote it. I also could not find many people to talk with in English or any other language I could speak.

We are often trained in the west to regard ourselves as faulty and guilty. It goes along with the Christian tradition of being born in sin. No matter what some writers put down, they are convinced it is wrong and not good enough. Heaven knows, I fall into this category. Part of my writer's block consists of not being good enough to be published or putting something out there that people would hate.

Perfection is a self-imposed set of rules and beliefs that some of us put on and it is rigid and stiff and does not fit anyone. In these set of molds, no one is good enough. Remember the parable about it being easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven? It was dreamed up by some poor scribe to help poor people feel better about themselves but made everyone think how no one was getting into heaven.

I wish I knew a magic portion that would enable writers to just put the words down and do your best and fuck everyone who don't like it. If I knew that magic portion, I would take it too. There is always going to be someone who will say this stinks and that is no good and that is not right for this publication and that is not right for this time and on and on. I wrote something the other day that made me feel like my last car, about two inches tall. My sons sold it to a wrecking yard. The only thing I could do was breath in and breath out.

A Nobel Prize winning writer stayed in his room for two weeks because of a bad review for his last book because he was convinced everyone was talking about him and how bad the book was. Then he found out from his neighbor that the magazine where it appeared never made it into the small village they lived in because of a storm in the mountains. Then the writer worried about the magazine coming in after the storm subsided. Enough is enough. I would have thought a Nobel Prize was enough to give some relief from this perfection and low self-esteem.

If I don't write the books that are in my head, they will stay in my head and die when I do. I care about my fictional characters and don't want that to happen to them. I also don't want that for stories that are in other writers' heads. Everything we as writers write has the potential of not being liked by some reader. That can't be helped. I know of another writer who wrote a book that had limited sales. It was science fiction and 14th of others he wrote and he could never give up his day job of selling suits in a large men's warehouse. Yet, he found out from his publisher that a man was going to kill himself one night but read his book instead and credited his book with saving his life and turning it around. It made a difference to him and helped him write the next one.

Try and push the keys, send that pen across the paper pad or whatever it takes to write your stories and novels. If the monkey of perfection lands on your shoulders and it will, punch it in the groin and keep going. What else are you going to do?