Monday, January 16, 2017

Perfection or Progress?

Throes of Creation by By Leonid Pasternak

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” — Ernest Hemingway

I don’t believe the phrase, ‘Practice makes perfect.’ My wife has a more accurate phrase that rings truer of my 41 years of observation and experience: “Practice makes progress.”

I don’t know if she made it up or heard it somewhere else, but I like it. The idea is to do something to the best of your ability, consistently, over and over and over. By doing this, you get better.

Write Every Day
Ray Bradbury encourages writers to, “write every day of your life.” He also adds that a writer should be a habitual reader as well. As a writer, you must write and write and write and write. And then write some more. By repetition, as long as we don’t repeat the same mistakes, we improve. I might write something that’s awful or something that I hate, but at least I am engaged in the writing process.

“One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing—writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.” —Lawrence Block

Never Perfection BUT Always Progress
No article, story or book will ever be 100% perfect. After my writing gets published, I always re-read it. Every time, I see things I could have done differently. That’s not to say that what I write is riddled with mistakes. But there are always tweaks to be made - better word choices, fewer adverbs or saying things more concisely.

As is the case with anything you do, improvement is incremental. There are no shortcuts. Sometimes it comes easily. Sometimes I fight and claw for it. But every time I write, I improve. Even as I make mistakes (and recognize them as such), I get better. Even if I write badly, at least I’m writing and hopefully improving.