The Pursuit of Perfection Read online

  A writer whose work I adore has revised my favorite novel of hers twice, publishing each revision as a new edition, neither of which I will buy. I loved that first edition of that book. I don’t care how much better she’s gotten as a craftsperson. That book didn’t need a word changed, in my opinion.

  At the workshop, one of the students pre-critiqued his own manuscript right after I called his name. We were well into the workshop by then; the writers knew the drill. We’d talk about the manuscript and then the author could speak. But he picked up the manuscript and volunteered to throw it away before we could comment on it.

  Another student turned on him and growled, “I loved this story.” Then everyone else piled on. Yep, most of us had loved that story and all of us who had loved it were deeply offended that he thought it flawed.

  When you learn a new bit of craft, when your skills have improved, when a reader points out a valid storytelling mistake in your published book that would take a complete revision of that book, what should you do?

  Leave the book alone.

  Incorporate what you’ve learned into the next book. You’ll learn something new on that book that you can then incorporate into the next book. Keep writing, keep learning, keep improving. But for God’s sake, don’t look backwards. Those books are done.

  How do you know when a manuscript is done? That’s trickier. I think you should trust the process, fix the nits, and move to the next book. Writing is a subconscious art, not a conscious one. You heard your first story before you could speak, so your subconscious knows a lot more about writing than your conscious brain ever will.

  Trust that.

  Many writers don’t believe what I just wrote, and that’s fine. You need to define it for yourself. Set a limit on revisions, set a limit on drafts, set a time limit. (My book must be done in August, no matter what.) Then release your book on the unsuspecting public.

  The book will never be perfect. Take the advice that those of us who’ve worked in broadcasting learned long ago. I think it was best expressed by Tina Fey in Bossy Pants: The show doesn’t go on when it’s finished; it goes on because it’s 11:30.

  Exactly. At some point, you must simply let go of that book or story or play and move to the next.

  If our workshopping friend Bill Shakespeare strove for perfection, we would never have heard of him. We wouldn’t have gotten all of that marvelous writing, all of those wonderful—flawed—plays. (You don’t think A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the only one riddled with possible workshop-identifiable errors, do you? Think of Romeo and Juliet. Why didn’t those crazy lovesick kids just move to another town????)

  With so many publishing options, it’s harder now for a writer to believe in her work. Does she go to traditional publishing and ask them to validate her book? Does she self-publish and hope for the best?

  I understand that. I also think that writers need to understand that they’re not writing for one editor or agent or for a small subset of people like a critique group. Writers write for readers.

  And it’s up to the writer as to how to find those readers. As Sarah A. Hoyt said in last week’s comments, ask yourself, “How will this book best reach its audience?” The key words here are “book,” “reach,” and “audience.”

  Not “How do I impress Editor A?” or “How do I get an agent?” But how does this book best reach its audience? Sometimes that answer is through traditional publishing. Sometimes that answer is to become an indie writer.

  The question should never ever be, “How do I write the perfect novel?” because the perfect novel or short story or play or article or essay does not exist.

  A better question is, “How do I make the book the best it can be?” That you have to answer for yourself. Me, I make sure I have outside help—a dedicated first reader or two or three before my book goes to my editor in traditional publishing or to the people I hire when I self-publish. A copy editor in both cases to make sure that my dyslexia doesn’t make my books impossible to read. A “stet” stamp so that I can disagree with said copy editor when I wanted a particular misspelling or poorly constructed sentence to stand for story reasons. The best possible cover. The best possible interior design.

  Sometimes I get a say in those last two things. Sometimes I don’t.

  I also don’t always get a say in how the books get distributed either. Remember, my goal is to find my audience, and when my traditional publishers choose not to pursue every distribution option open to them (because it’s too much work or there’s “too little return”), I get angry.

  My readership varies from book to book, series to series, genre to genre. I never know who will like something I wrote. I just have to give that person the opportunity to find what I did.

  Sometimes readers like my work. Sometimes they don’t. Once the book is released into the wilds of publishing, however, it’s done. Finished. I will not revise a published book.

  Is my craft better than it was twenty years ago when I published my first novel? Oh, hell, yes. But my craft is so much better that I could never have written that novel now. Because there’s something in the middle of it that no established writer, steeped in craft, would ever attempt. At the time I wrote the book, I didn’t know you couldn’t do that thing, so I did it.

  Had I workshopped that novel, more experienced writers would have told me to remove that thing. Yet that thing is what readers remark on the most about that novel.

  When you strive for perfection in your writing, you’re dooming yourself to perpetual failure. When you strive to be the best you can be, you will have a fulfilling life.

  Writers who are always improving, always learning, move forward. They are secure in the knowledge that the book they wrote ten years ago is the best book it could have been given their level of craft and their understanding of the art of writing at the time they finished the book. They’re better now, so they write new things, explore new pathways.

  They grow.

  They also realize that they have a career, not a novel. The people who tell you to endlessly revise, the people who tell you not to try something new until you’ve mastered the old, the people who believe that you should make every word perfect before you move onto a new project, those people don’t have writing careers. They might have things that seem like writing careers, like a few published stories, one or two novels.

  But they don’t make their living from their craft (in other words, publishing their writing). They also approach storytelling from the point of view of perfection, not the point of view of enjoyment.

  If a flawed novel entertains, it has done its job.

  How do you know if a novel entertains? Talk to its fans. Look at its sales figures. See how many people recommend it to their friends.

  How do you learn to be the best writer you can be? Step one: Read other people’s work for enjoyment. Stop critiquing manuscripts. Stop thinking everything can be perfect.

  Then write a lot. Practice, practice, practice. Find your audience—and respect them.

  After all, they’re forking out their hard-earned cash to pay for one of your stories. If they buy more of your work, then you’re doing something right.

  Perfection in publishing—like perfection in life—does not exist.

  So why do people cry in my craft workshops? Essentially because I tell them they don’t have to be perfect. They just need to have fun. They need to share that fun with their readers. Writers understand that. We all do. We like to share our work—the best work we can do—with other people. Not perfect work. The best. Even if it has two additional unnecessary endings.

  Like this.

  Careers, Critics, and Professors

  I just spent forty-five minutes clicking through various websites on careers in the arts to double check one of my assumptions from my past. When I graduated from high school, everyone I knew casually would have thought that I would have become a politician or a musician. My interests seemed to be in public speaking and performing music. Many of my fr
iends knew I wrote, but those friends would have guessed that any writing career I chose would have been in journalism—and it was, for a while.

  When I went to college, I would walk past the music school and see the notices on the door about auditioning. Auditioning scared the piss out of me. Music performance scares me to death. It still does. I’m a half-assed musician. I can sight-read extremely well—can actually hear the music in my head when I read the music—and I get to the point where I can play what I’m seeing on the page (or can’t play it in the case of some piano pieces because my hands aren’t large enough), and I move onto another piece of music. I don’t want to master that piece of music; I just want to understand it. I suspect, had I gone through the doors of those two different music schools at my two different schools, I would have become a composer. Yep, the creative bent always remains toward creating my own stuff, not doing someone else’s.

  (And jazz, which is often about improvisation, requires a mastery before you get to improvisation on stage, which meant I would have had to conquer my stage fright to get there. Oddly, I don’t have stage fright when speaking publicly, especially extemporaneously. I do whenever I play music, sing, or work off a script before an audience. Yeah, weird. I know.)

  Anyway, after writing about perfection in my business blog, I found myself thinking about education and attitudes and training, which is what led me to the music schools. I wanted to see if my undergraduate assumptions were correct.

  What were those assumptions? I assumed that as a musician-in-training, I would have to perform. I also assumed that the music school would train me for a musical career in any one of a dozen disciplines, including performance and making a living as a professional musician, not just as a professional teacher.

  But I wasn’t sure that my assumptions were correct. So, today I researched. I not only found that the music schools I didn’t attend put a career in performance, conducting, composing, and arranging front and center, well before any teaching or research, but also that there’s a National Association of Schools of Music, which provides accreditation for music schools around the country, setting standards for those schools. Both music schools I avoided were accredited.

  Before those of you who are familiar with all of this jump all over me, I know, I know. Everything is filled with politics, particularly universities. I’m the daughter of a professor, the sister of two professors, the sister-in-law of yet another professor, and I spent decades in and around higher education.

  I also know that music schools, particularly those at universities, tend to focus on classical music (although some also have prestigious programs in other musical disciplines, like the University of Idaho does in jazz).

  I understand all is not as it seems from a quick website search.

  However, I did a similar website search for my home university’s graduate program in creative writing. This program is (according to its website) ranked third in the country for a Creative Writing MFA.

  I poked around the site and didn’t see much mention of a career in publishing at all. In fact, the only mention came through the list of visiting authors, who would spend time discussing “the academic job market or the ins and outs of publishing.”

  I dug deeper into the website, and it became clear the benefits of the MFA program in Creative Writing are an opportunity to edit the school’s literary journal, and the opportunity to teach courses in Creative Writing and English Composition.

  Training in how to publish works doesn’t exist, nor is there any real mention of how to have a non-teaching career in publishing. The only hint of that comes from this: there will be visiting editors and agents who are “on the lookout for the next generation of American literature.”

  I saw the name of one visiting “professional” who is currently scamming literary authors with a horrendous contract and promise of major publication. This particular author/editor is actually buying ownership of the unsuspecting writer’s property in the contract he offers, and paying that writer a pittance.

  Am I bashing my former university’s creative writing program here? No. In fact, nothing I’ve told you is new to me.

  I learned about that program back when I was a hotheaded journalist, newly returned from the Clarion Writers Workshop. For an article I was writing for the local indie paper, I saw the then-head of the Creative Writing division of the English Department and asked him why his writing program didn’t feature published writers or emphasize careers in writing.

  He took my questions very well. First of all, he said, he didn’t believe that genre writing was writing (just like, at the time, there were music professors who didn’t believe that popular music was music). He stated that the program as designed was to help the MFA candidates become PhD candidates in Creative Writing so that they could get prestigious jobs teaching creative writing at major universities.

  He also pointed out, correctly, that I should have researched the creative writing program before taking classes there, to see if it fit my goals as a student. (I didn’t have the heart to tell him that at the time I was in his program, I only took the writing classes to fit in my fiction writing along with my homework for my history degree.)

  He also told me that (at the time) there were no programs at reputable universities that offered the kind of writing education that I wanted. Clarion itself, which was then sponsored by Michigan State University, was a graduate course taken for a handful of credits, not an entire degree program.

  So, why am I talking about this now? Because a number of things happened in the past few weeks that got me thinking about the deeply ingrained attitudes that writers have about writing, their work, and their futures.

  First, the response to my blog post on perfection was a revelation to me. I did expect a lot of comments. Certainly not as many as I got, however.

  I fully expected to have more questions about what I teach. I also expected to have a lot of negative comments. Now I might have circumvented those by telling people that if they were rude, they couldn’t comment, but I figure people who disagree with me should be mature enough to do so politely. I’m told there’s a lot of disagreement on writer boards and other listserves, but I haven’t followed any of the links I got sent because I’ve said my piece and flame wars don’t interest me.

  What surprised me was that the bulk of the 200-plus comments are from writers who feel relief, who are happy to be released from this idea of perfection, who are pleased that they can just write what they want without fear of having to continually revisit past work without doing anything new. See for yourself. It’s startling. (At least I think so.)

  So I’ve been mulling over the comments, both the content of them and the sheer number of them. The post went viral, which I expected, but not because of the folks who disagreed with me, but because the folks who agree with me are passing it along. (Usually it’s the angry folks who share.) So that’s a surprise as well.

  Then last week, I received yet another Google alert about a post of mine someone disagrees with. This time, it was something I said about promotions. The person who disagreed with me was convinced I didn’t know what I was talking about when it came to the necessity of promoting work, particularly for a new writer. The writer actually said that I had never had a point in my career where I was unknown, which made me laugh. Um, we were all beginning writers once upon a time.

  The writer challenged me to self-publish things under a super-secret pen name, and was convinced I would understand then why new writers need to promote. I actually responded to this writer’s blog post—I usually don’t—because of the challenge, and because I’d met that challenge years ago.

  I have four things up online under four super-secret pen names, things which I put up with no promotion. One outsells everything I do under my name and my known pen names. One isn’t doing very well at all, and two are doing okay. All outsell some titles I have under the Rusch name. So I have met the challenge, plus some.

  I had to explain to this new w
riter that back in the Dark Ages of Publishing when I started there was no such thing as Twitter, blogging, Facebook, and the like. If a writer wanted to promote her work, she had to spend more than her advance to do so. Because even back then, publishers didn’t promote 95% of the books they published. Those books would sink or swim based on sales in bookstores that might or might not carry the books. Some of my early work wasn’t even listed with description and a cover photo in the publisher’s catalog. Just a one line listing under “Also Available” which was arranged by genre.

  So how did a writer sell a lot of copies of her book? She wrote another. Back in the Dark Ages of Publishing, before the conglomerate bean counters got involved, most writers (even new writers) got a multibook contract. Because back then, publishers knew it was the number of titles on the shelf that sold books, not the quality of an as-yet-unread single title, that got a reader to pick up a book.

  So I not only met the blogger’s challenge in this new world of publishing, I met that challenge every time I had traditionally published a book with a brand new name on the spine.

  As I wrote my response, I realized that this writer/blogger didn’t have a clue about a writing career. It was all about the book. The book had to be promoted because it might sink. And that, according to the writer/blogger, would be a catastrophe.

  This writer/blogger is not alone. Most of what I do in my nonfiction and in my teaching is about training writers to think about a career, not about a book or a single story.

  I continually teach professional writers just that very concept: write and release. Write and release. Get your work out there. Build an oeuvre. We don’t talk about business much—at least overtly—but we do talk about it all the time as I show them how to get rid of the roadblocks that they, and their training, have put in the way of the writing.