If you’ve been checking my blog regularly (hi, mom!) you may have noticed that I’ve been trying to post something every day. As a terminal perfectionist, this is really hard! Why? Because when you make a lot of something–no matter how talented you are–most of it will be garbage.
Not everything I write gets published, of course, and there’s revision and editing, too. But that’s just the teeth of the trap: the perfect excuse to put off publishing until I feel it’s “good enough.”
Sometimes I have to work really hard to remind myself that this is a mistake.
My recent post “Better Than Perfect” explored the idea that ugliness is better than perfection, because perfection isn’t real. That’s true, but it’s not the whole truth: ugliness isn’t merely a compromise between (unreal) perfection and (real) beauty, it’s an unavoidable part of the process. There are no roads to greatness that don’t pass through acres of garbage.
The first time I realized this was in high school. For my birthday, a friend of mine gave me a gorgeous leather-bound journal. It was so nice I felt obligated to fill it up with something, so I decided I’d start a habit of writing in it every day.
Sure enough, nearly all of it was garbage–noticeably worse than anything I’d previously written, even though I’d been practicing for years. But, because I wanted to actually fill up the journal rather than merely write in it, I’d set myself the condition that going back and revising things I’d already written didn’t count–only new entries qualified. So instead of trying to improve the trash, as I normally would have, I was forced to move on.
It was challenging, and trying to come up with something new and good every day didn’t get any easier over time. But after a few months of daily writing, I noticed something curious: although the quality of my garbage didn’t seem to be improving at all, the things I wrote that did turn out good were getting better.
Not just a little bit better. They were much, much better. The best things I’d ever written!
It didn’t last forever. Once I’d met my original goal and filled the journal, I tried to keep the habit with a new one. But I was busy with college by then, and by the end of the day sometimes I could hardly keep my eyes open long enough to scrawl some nonsensical drivel and turn out the light. I started making excuses–still writing new things, but giving myself some slack when I was too tired to make them good. It was a perfectly valid excuse! But excuses for laziness have a nasty tendency of becoming habits. I started giving myself more and more slack–and wouldn’t you know it, my writing stopped improving.
After I graduated, the same pattern repeated with this very blog. At first, I committed to posting something at least once a week, and as long as I did my writing improved. As before, the majority of my writing was mediocre at best. But the posts I was proudest of at the time are, by and large, still posts I’m proud of today (even though the style of those old posts seems terribly juvenile and pretentious to me now). But eventually, I stopped holding myself to a schedule, and my blog gradually fizzled and died.
The moral? Well, I could draw the moral that sticking to a schedule helps me improve–and that’s true!–but it would be missing the broader lesson. The reason keeping to a schedule helps is because it forces me to make trash.
I’ve always been a planner, more comfortable with imagination than reality. My instinct is to avoid the risk of committing to something that might be wrong, or ugly, or embarrassing. But in doing so, I’m throwing away priceless treasure: the practice–in both senses of the word–that is the only road to improvement. If you want to make yourself (or the world!) better, you have to make garbage.
Precious, precious garbage.
P.S. Ironically, this post turned out to be an example of its own message: it’s too wordy, it rambles, the pacing’s all over the place, and I don’t think I got the message across as clearly as I could have. But I have to post something today, so…it will have to do!
In Search of Secrets 