Your ideas are probably good enough.
Perfectionism is a bit exhausting.
Writers need to understand that art takes time and that some projects can only come to fruition after they are given enough time to breathe. Director Taika Waititi has even talked about a practice where he’ll write a script, leave it alone for over a year, come back with fresh eyes, toss the draft out, and then rewrite the script from memory, preserving only the parts that were worth remembering. Writers ought to learn that giving stories space allows you to gain perspective and hone in on what truly resonates in a work. However, on the other side of that lesson is sorting which projects need time, and which you should tackle now while the passion is still there.
In the same way that both self-hate and arrogance can mar a personal essay, leniency and perfectionism are two different paths to unravel the writer.
Writing is iterative, meaning that you recreate and build upon a previous version of a work until you arrive at the finished version. But the point of iteration is to bring forth the best an idea has to offer. Iteration for me, however, often means getting excited about an idea, trying to perfect it for so long that I get bored of it, and then abandoning the project.
In the same way that both self-hate and arrogance can mar a personal essay, leniency and perfectionism are two different paths to unravel the writer.
Seeing a project through to the end is a skill in its own right. I often get too precious about my work. I spend weeks, months, or even years sitting on newsletters and small stories that likely reached a point of good enough a few drafts ago.
There’s a digital artist who goes by Beeple, known for his project called the Everdays, where every day for the past 14 years, he has started, finished, and uploaded a new piece of art. To his knowledge, he has not missed a single day.
As someone with eight issues of a biweekly newsletter I started almost a year ago, there’s a lot that I admire about his follow-through.
As I’m writing this, Beeple is just shy of posting a new piece of art consecutively for 5400 days. I watched a video of his process on the Corridor Crew channel. He was very harsh on his art as he created it, but I liked his approach because he looked at each Everyday as just a small part of the larger whole. He doesn’t have to get so precious about each piece of art since they are just one five-thousandth of the project.
I appreciate the idea of not taking every single creative act as a deathly serious endeavor. I feel like writers like to picture themselves as the dashing solitary figure out in a cabin turning out page after page by some crashing waves (or forest creatures, depending on the genre). Eventually, we emerge with a masterpiece that everyone will love. But if you have any designs of being a writer with work other than your magnum opus, you can’t let every idea live and die entirely inside of your head.
Another story I learned from the Corridor Crew channel is a famous tale about Richard Williams, the master animator behind Who Framed Roger Rabbit. He spent over a quarter of a century working on his passion project, the animated film The Thief and the Cobbler. If you’re unaware, 2-D animation is arguably one of the most painstaking arts out there. Animators usually have to create 12 individual drawings for every second you see on screen. Williams, however, was known for animating “on ones,” meaning that his work often featured 24 drawings per second. Not only that, the shots from The Thief and the Cobbler were often incredibly complex with winding backgrounds and intricate camera movements in every still, and it was all done using traditional hand-drawn techniques on massive pads of paper. He spent nearly 30 years working on the film on and off. Eventually, the production company funding Williams seized control of the movie after he failed to meet deadlines.
I mention this story without any judgment, but I will say that these anecdotes about Beeple and Williams offer two very contrasting views on creativity.
I don’t think I have designs to publish creative work every day, nor do I intend to spend 30 years on any one idea. I do want some of my work to be great, and I’m ready to take the time necessary for that. But I think what I’m learning is that I also want a lot of my writing to just be good enough.
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As far as actionable takeaways go, I would say to shoot a text to a creative friend and ask for an hour call for both of you to be one another’s sounding boards. No pressure or expectations—but explaining an idea to a trusted friend can reinject some excitement into it. Let’s just start with having some of our ideas exist in at least one other place than our own heads.
Thank you for this Jade – and lovely to meet you in the LWS Mingle recently. I literally have about 50 notebooks full of abandoned writing projects and ideas that somehow never got past a few lines, paragraphs or pages, or even whole notebooks filled with research, so it is nothing short of a miracle that I continue to press on with my present historical fiction novel (it's an ambitious epic set in early Edo Japan / early 17th century Amsterdam; being that I've never been to Japan and certainly didn't live in that era, there are endless times the many research rabbit holes threaten to derail me, which is when I usually just have to rely on my imagination in order to keep going – nothing helps kill a stalling perfectionism better than getting stuck after days of fruitless research! [I was heartened to hear from The Bone Season author that she spent 3 weeks trying to find out what materials were used in a certain type of mediaeval hat – I know that feeling!]). I am now midway through the first draft, about 90,000 words after over a year and a half of occasionally interrupted regular writing, but I could not have done it without the encouragement of others like yourself in London Writers Salon.
Thanks for your reminder not to let a good enough idea to die!