Learning to Embrace Imperfection

I’m immersed in the edit of the next novel and learning to embrace imperfection.

I could spend another four years learning writing craft, and another four years honing and drafting. That’s after three years of a degree studying the masters; Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, Hardy. I know what good storytelling looks like, but that didn’t teach me to tell a good story.

What literary criticism teaches is there’s no such thing as a perfect novel. It took a while to realize, sometimes imperfection adds to the greatness.

I spent three years writing unfinished novels. I didn’t know how to tell the stories in my head.

Many more years followed writing content for the web. All storytelling, of a kind.

Why did the drafts of my novel series take so long? Partly life; it gets in the way. Partly, finding my voice. And partly completing whole sentences. My prose is terrible.

Not forgetting character. I learned that anyone can write plot. It’s the characters readers cleave to.

And still, it took four years to complete that three-volume series. The editing, especially of Book One, was agony. Eventually I decided: wrap up, finish, publish, move on.

And the hardest part: learning to embrace imperfection. Do I labor for a lifetime and never publish, or make a judgement on each manuscript?

Setting the bar

I’d love my prose to earn a Pulitzer or Nobel nomination. I know it never will. I’m not that kind of writer. I can’t be Hemingway, and I never wanted to be Hardy. And anyway, I’d rather write prose of plain glass than stained glass. I write genre fiction, not literary fiction. At some point, I decided I’m okay with that.

Some mass-market authors talk about an MVP, ‘minimum viable product.’ These are the rapid-release merchants, capable of cranking out multiple books a year. To them, minimum viable product places quantity above quality. There’s a lower bar for effort to get each book out the door.

I’d like to aim a little higher than that. That’s just me.

When ‘good enough’ is good enough

I have to make my own call, to decide when ‘good enough’ is good enough. How many drafts do I need to make the prose clean and functional? To give it enough weight, pitch enough emotion. Can the reader relate to the characters? Cheer for them; well up with tears, but maybe not sob for them?

‘Good enough’ is not ‘perfect.’ I don’t have the time or the temperament for ‘perfect.’ I set my own standard, raise my own flag.

Perhaps I lack detail in my description, layers in my characterization? Perhaps I skip too easily through the A-plot and miss the B-plot entirely.

I write short and leave the reader to fill in the gaps. I edit for clarity. Better to lead than school the reader in what to think. Maybe they’ll like my characters, maybe they won’t?

But which is better, the unfinished novel, forever 99% close to perfect? Or the finished novel that I can say is ‘good enough?’ One that I’m happy for people to read?

I’m learning to embrace imperfection.