In writing, we say “kill your darlings”. It means we must be willing to delete favorite characters, beloved phrases, special plot points, anything that we love, if it doesn’t further the story. It’s one of the hardest lessons for young writers to learn. When you craft a beautiful sentence, create a fully formed character, any time you have “got it right”, you never want to give up on it. Even when it’s not helping your story.
And yet you must.
I’ve learned a different, difficult lesson recently. It’s a lesson in two parts. The first isn’t a surprise, the second was more unexpected.
Lesson number one is to do your best, no matter what. I have used a phrase through several careers that annoys some of my co-workers, especially those who report to me. “Good Enough Isn’t Good Enough”
While I don’t believe in “perfection”, I do believe it should be the aim. Even knowing that I’ll never get there, it is important that I never stop reaching for every ounce of perfection I can grasp. My best work may only be 70, 80 or 90 percent of perfection, but if I’m willing to settle for “good enough” I’ll never get even that close.
The second lesson is that it’s dangerous to my mental health to go back and look at my early work. It’s just…appalling.
These two lessons came into play as I took advantage of the C-19 downtime to dive deeper into my writing software. My primary software is Scrivener, and it’s capable of many wonderful things. I like to dive right in and explore as I go. This results in me working harder than I need to sometimes. So, with no major project underway, why not watch some videos and stretch my skills?
What happened was I figured out some formatting issues with my most recent book (You Call, I Drive, click the link!). Which was great. Then I thought, I should look at my first book, “Shorts-A Collection of Short Fiction”.
The first thing I want to note is that “Shorts” was a pure experiment. I’d been dabbling with writing for years. So I had a cache of mostly finished short stories (um, yeah. More on that in a minute), and an easy way to publish. Easy, right? So I finished the polish on the stories, had a couple people do a quick read through, worked up a cover, slogged through the process of publishing online, and BAM, I was a published author. The book wasn’t perfect, but it got some nice reviews, we sold a couple copies and I was a happy camper.
Five years later, I took another look. I’ve spent most of that time working on the craft of writing. Reading, writing, being around other writers. There is no doubt I’m a better writer than I was.
But O.M.G.My thought was that I could do a better job of formatting the book, snazz up the presentation a little. Then I started reading. It’s not that the writing is bad, it’s just not polished. At all. I started going through every story in the collection. And realized that I could make myself crazy. And never write another word in my life. Just trying to get this “perfect”.
Does that sound like I’m contradicting myself (“Good Enough Isn’t Good Enough”)? Maybe a little. I did re-edit and re-format the book. By the time you read this post, the updated version should be in place. The two-fold lesson here is that I didn’t do enough the first time through. I was happy with “good enough”. Typos got through, punctuation was inconsistent, sentence structure was awkward. There’s also an understanding that I have to be ready to walk away from a work. No, it isn’t perfect. But at some point it has to be finished. There is a point of diminishing returns in the creative process, at least for me. I can’t spend all my time looking at what’s gone before.
Lesson learned.
Stories Are My Life 
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