The illusion of perfection

I’ve always been a perfectionist. In school, I never studied to pass; I studied to get top grades. I was only ever satisfied if my end-of-year report card showed all As. Luckily, I was a bit more relaxed by the time I started my bachelor’s degree, though I still strove to do as well as possible.

perfection (noun) : the quality or state of being perfect or flawless

When I wrote my first novel, I was very much in the same mindset. I wanted it to be perfect. I needed it to be perfect. But I had a very tough lesson to learn: the perfect book doesn’t exist. For the first time in my life, I was in a position where I could give my absolute best and would still fall short of being perfect.

The thing with books (and with any other creative products) is that you can never please everyone. Of course there’s still good writing vs. bad writing, and I had to study the craft of writing to improve. And though I keep improving with every book that I write, I’ve let go of the illusion of perfection. At least, I’m trying to. It’s easy to fall back into my old habits of wanting to write the perfect scene or chapter. When that happens, I have to remind myself that I could spend years on it and some reader might still dislike it.

Giving up on perfection doesn’t mean giving up on improvement and growth. It simply means to stop chasing a goal that can never be achieved, setting oneself up for success rather than failure. This is certainly easier said than done, and it takes a lot of effort and introspection to change one’s attitude toward perfection. I try to utilize my desire for perfection as a driving force, while learning to better recognize when something is already close enough to perfection for me to be satisfied with the result.

Focus on finishing your imperfect ideas, not perfecting your unfinished ideas.

No book might be perfect for everyone, so I write the kind of books I would love to read. And in the end, I’d rather publish a book that’s imperfect than continue to work on perfecting a book that will never see the light of day. Otherwise I’d just end up stuck in a vicious cycle of revisions because there’s always something that I could improve. I write, I revise, and I revise again, and I’ll let my editor fix the rest. And once I hit ‘publish’ I need to trust that I’ve done the best that I can.