The Enemy of the Good

"The perfect is the enemy of the good."
--Voltaire.

I'd never thought of myself as a perfectionist. I mean, I'm a WriMo. I don't care if something is good, as long as it helps me along the way to 50,000 words, right? If anyone suggested that I was a perfectionist when it came to writing, I have several thousand inane words of my characters joking about cannibalism that beg to differ.

Last month, I went to read through the book I wrote before this past November, a book I thought had a ton of potential. My sister loved it. My mom said I had finally mastered the art of creating a tight plot. Even Miri liked it. Me, I got about 100 pages and had to put it down. The thing was a corny mess. I wondered why I was still writing.

A couple days later, I started wondering where I went wrong with this book. It occurred to me that it might not be that the book was that bad, but that my expectations were too high. I thought about it a little more and realized that I had thought that this book was going to be a classic--maybe even a Great American Novel. Embarrassing but true.

Once I realized that nobody writes a Great American Novel on the first try (and that historical political fantasy/romance is probably not going to get on the classics shelf anytime soon), I could start reading again without being so critical. I even started enjoying it a little. A lot of the novel still sucks, but I don't hate so much any more. Now I know it doesn't have to be perfect.