The Tyranny of Perfection

Reading Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds recently, I was reminded of an Intro I wrote for Knock and Enter, a book I edited during my stint as Writer-in-Residence with UNESCO / Dublin City Libraries. To wit:

I’ve always thought that an octopus would make for an ideal Editor, with its eight arms and a complex nervous system that consists of one main brain and eight mini-brains that operate each arm independently.
 Of course, most writers would likely also wish that their editors were octopuses, given that octopodes possess three hearts, one of which might be given over to compassion for those who toil at the coalface creating the imperishable prose which the editor, having nothing better to do, then proceeds to blithely deface with his or her ‘suggestions’ and ‘advice’.
 Happily, whilst all octopuses are venomous, only the blue-ringed octopus is actually deadly to humans. And while the business of writing can feel like a tiresome chore – planning and writing and editing, and rewriting, and re-editing, and then rewriting some more – it very rarely proves fatal.

 Writing advice is hedged about with clichés (‘Write what you know’; ‘Read, read, read,’ etc.) but some clichés have their kernel of truth, and none more so than ‘Writing is re-writing’ – and if you’re a writer who doesn’t like the idea of reworking your stuff, then you’re in for a long, hard uphill slog.
 There are very good reasons, of course, why new writers might resist the idea of re-writing. Whether it’s schoolwork or sport, or life itself, we’re socialised from a very young age to get it right first time (‘Do you want it quick or do you want it good? Both, you say? I see.’) and to view mistakes as some kind of personal failing. And we’re all time-poor these days; if we can only get it right at the first attempt, think of all the time we can save.
 Except getting ‘it’ right – when ‘it’ is the creation of a whole new world peopled with complex characters – is virtually impossible. Even if you’ve plotted your story out before you begin, even if you know exactly who your characters are and will become, there’s simply too much to get exactly right at exactly the right time.
 This might sound like something of a downer; in fact, it’s one of the great opportunities that writing offers. In life, we have no choice but to stumble ever onwards, tripping over our mistakes and fixing them on the hoof (or ignoring them and hoping no one notices); in writing (or re-writing, rather) we get to go back in and fix it until we’re happy (happy-ish).
 Accepting that you’re not going to get it right first time might come as something of a blow to the old ego, but it does allow for an enormous amount of freedom. The freedom to get it not quite right; to make and acknowledge mistakes; to allow yourself, for the purpose of this draft at least, to be less than perfect (‘Perfect is the enemy of good’).
 We can waste a lot of our energy in worrying about getting it immediately right, turning what should be a positive (creativity, imagination) into a negative (the grinding, Sisyphean pursuit of perfection). But perfection can wait. Instead, take a deep breath, open yourself up to the inevitability of temporary failure, and allow yourself the delicious freedom (dare we call it fun?) of getting it wrong for now.

On Sisyphus, Hercules And Shaggy Dog Tayls

First off, apologies for the intermittent service at Crime Always Pays these days. All Three Regular Readers are, I know, accustomed to more regular reading than has been provided here over the last few weeks. But work has gone crazy in the last couple of months, and I’m also working on an extra-curricular project that is barrelling helter-skelter towards a deadline that looms large at the end of the month. So if you bear with me, normal-ish service will be resumed in short order.
  Meanwhile, I had a short review of Ken Bruen’s HEADSTONE (Transworld Ireland) published in the Irish Times yesterday. It ran a lot like this:

HEADSTONE
By Ken Bruen
Transworld Ireland (£12.99)
Jack Taylor is probably the least private eye in crime fiction. In Ken Bruen’s novels, Taylor is as well-known on Galway’s streets as Eyre Square itself, and as easy to find. Further, he’s ‘an alkie vigilante with notions above his station’, as one character describes him here.
  Would you commission this man to find your wandering daughter?
  ‘Headstone’ is the ninth in the Jack Taylor series, and Ken Bruen’s 29th novel in total. The plot finds Jack pitched against a neo-Nazi group bent on slaughter, while also trying to track down a priest who has absconded with the funds of an Opus Dei-style organisation.
  As always, the plot is incidental. It’s traditional for fictional private eyes to investigate a disappearance, an absence or a lack, in the process shining a light into the dark corners of the culture from which they spring. Jack Taylor tends to ramble around Galway pointing out its shortcomings in his uniquely bleak and lacerating way, occasionally remembering to engage with the job he has been commissioned to do.
  ‘Mostly what you got was tired,’ he says after one less-than-heroic effort. ‘My limp ached. I even did a Google search. Nope. He had really flown under the radar.’
  Bruen, of course, is fully aware of Jack Taylor’s limitations, both as a man and the hero of a series of novels. Taylor is the self-referential, knowing creation of an author with a PhD in Metaphysics, a private eye who not only reads crime novels to restore his equilibrium, but one who falls in love with a crime fiction writer. ‘At my most cynical, I thought I was simply material for her next book,’ he says. ‘A broken-down Irish PI, with a limp and a hearing-aid. Yeah, that would fly …’
  Yes, Jack Taylor is an absurd character. As ludicrous as any knight errant tilting at windmills, or Hercules hosing down the Augean Stables of Galway, or Sisyphus flogged up and down his hill time and time again.
  Are we meant to take him at all seriously? Probably not. He is, after all, a bottomless well of compassion and rage, and as such is an entirely preposterous creation in contemporary Ireland. Long may he run. - Declan Burke