Overcoming Good Enough

Marisaw

Actually I feel I have the opposite problem. I’m convinced my work is never good enough, which can lead me to keep on revising when I shouldn’t.

Lvocem

This is a complex subject. The problem with thinking that is not good enough and seeking perfection is that you end up with nothing. You cut everything down, you self doubt, you listen to every idiot there that tells you to stop telling and do everything in show mode, never use passive voice and so on and so forth.
If you think it’s good enough and you’re careless, you do not do the extra work to make it better, to move if from the cliche zone, done a million times zone, using titles that have been overdone, and you believe that you’re are good enough to print when in reality you are not.
Is one right and the other wrong? Neither is. In my book it’s the wrong yard stick.
When you study UX/UI experience they tell you that perfect is the enemy of completion. In reality everything that you do, as good as it can be, can be better, but that better is the result of taking huge risks and willing to make huge mistakes. So the important thing is to take the chance, do it. Get it ready for workshop. Notice I said, workshop, not out there. Realize that in that process, your work will be critiqued, questioned, thrown under a bus and a few Semis, turned into intellectual mush. That is good. It means you are pushing. Learn, discard, ignore, but find the voices that speak your truth. In that respect this article is in the money. Realize that you your critique is used to reading horror they are not going to give you good advice if you are reading Jennifer Egan or Kasuo Ishiguro. So understand where the advice comes from. But then realize that being too much of a perfectionist it will ruin good work. It’s not going to get better but more stale. So give yourself room for the rawness of the material that you like to read. And let it rip. There’s always the next edit, and edit a lot.

Vidyut

I’m a total optimisation junkie. Good enough is a dime a dozen. Why waste my time?

Lvocem

The number one enemy of a writer is perfection and perfectionism. I’ve seen this so many times in workshop groups. You have the man or woman who feels is a great writer that in one sitting comes up with fairly good stuff. Then comes critique time and we all realize that is well, just good enough. So the writer gives up because why wast their time. And that is totally wrong, wrong, wrong. The reality is that even a writer that thinks is good, can and will be better by doing and doing. Why, because only by doing, taking chances (where crap will also be created) that something new and fresh will come out. Unless it comes out perfect, why waste their time. So these writers give up. They leave the group.

In reality what is important is persistence, persistence and the realization that you will get better with time. So that first draft of whatever is more than likely simply good enough, a dime a dozen. So then you put your hat of persistence and begin the editing process. Most of the time what I show as a first draft to my group is actually the seventh edit. And I know that after critique I will edit again and again. Critique, put away, come back with fresh eyes and edit again. So these statements, “Good enough,” “Not good enough,” “Why waste my time.” Are fallacies that need to be eradicated from your lexicon. You write because you crave making love to your keyboard, strike these letters, puke them into a page, form and deform into sound and images, until they also evolve into emotions, love, lust, hate, desire, yearning. Period. If you write shit, you pile enough of it so you have the manure from which greatness can evolve. If you do not know what greatness is, that is easy, read greatness. Emulate it. Make it your own. Learn what a Hemingway sentence is like, or a meandering Faulknerian sentence feels like, or a melodious jagernout of images and sounds and emotions that is Cormac McCarthy. All you need ls persistence and a desire to want it. And not a second of that will be wasted time.

Jewells64

One fact is clear: If I write like everyone else, I’ll not stand out from the crowd. Perfection, good enough, passable…are relative terms. I write like me, nobody else. My stories, my plots, my style are my own. If they’re not “good enough,” so be it. In my 92 years I’ve been successful, have failed, and broke even. But in each instance I’ve never given up, given in. I like living in my own skin. Lotsa luck.

Attaree

Perfectionism is not always an enemy, but I believe mediocrity is.

Lvocem

And tell me, what is mediocrity? You do not wake up today and say to the world “I am going to be mediocre today.” You do not usually say, “I am not mediocre enough, I have to work less to achieve my goal.” No. Mediocre is usually a label we give to stuff, it’s a judgment call given to things that we do not deem good enough to our version of what is good. Yet our version of what may be good, may be considered mediocre to someone else. So mediocre, tends to a degree be completely subjective.
But the problem is this is how we end up with mediocre in the first place. Someone does something and follow a particular set of rules, maybe from books, from experience, but once they achieve that something they stop. They to not want to make mistakes, they want it to be perfect in whatever definition of perfect was given to them at that time. So mediocrity is born.

Honzo

Mediocrity is not subjective, it’s what the hump in the bell curve are doing. By definition, most stuff is objectively mediocre, and almost as objectively, the supply/demand curve causes us to judge its value accordingly.

BTW, when I was writing academic papers for hire, I frequently said to myself, ‘this is not mediocre enough.’ I always considered it essential for the work to be credible products of the nominal authors. I think that there are many authors at work today that are deliberately mediocre because that’s where they believe the money is. Mediocrity is the subtext of the ‘rules-based order’ of writing advice, and in these forums there are many advocates of pandering to the ‘modern reader,’ which I regard as a euphemism for what once was called ‘third grade level.’

I would suggest amending your statement to ‘but once they start making an income they stop (improving).’

Lvocem

I disagree. Look at everything that we think mediocre and you will find someone else that considers that great, or a great achievement for one reason or another.
For a sake of fun here’s a thought exercise in mediocrity. The Sherman Tank was a mediocre piece of engineering. A Tiger tank you take them out like shooting apples out of a barrel. The Tiger tank was in itself perfection. Yet who won? A mediocre piece of equipment because they understood the process much better. You brew up five Sherman tanks and you could gather the parts to build other tanks. You lost a screw in a Tiger tank and you were marooned until you count get the part not from other Panzers but that Tiger tank model. And while the Sherman did not have the fire power of a Tiger, they swarmed and danced around them to manage to get a kill.
If you look at the mediocrity of modern art, or the ketch of commercial art, or many of these elements, you will see that they are people who love them, people who hate them. So it’s all subjective. Any way. Enjoying this little discussion.

Honzo

I don’t believe you actually read what I said. Indeed, many people love mediocrity. That does not make it good. Likes on Facebook are not the measure of the correctness of a statement or the value of an insight. Mediocrity is the vast middle, taking up much more space than the outliers of truly good or abysmally awful. It’s the fast-food predictability of it that makes it popular, and the relatively low cost in time and neurons of consuming it adds to its attractions, but a steady diet of it will quite objectively kill you, or at least the part of you that matters.

You seem to confuse the fact that everything that you experience is by nature subjective with the idea that therefore nothing exists objectively. This kind of solipsism is irrefutable, but it’s also quite useless for navigating the world, which stubbornly persists in behaving as though it is objectively real.

Dvp

I understand. I hate about everything I write.

Lvocem

Hahaha.

Love your response. And I see what you say in that context. “Mediocrity is the vast middle.”
Bravo.

I read a few years back a short story collection by David Foster Wallace. Several of the stories were absolutely brilliant, then the rest, were… not mediocre (in my book) but horrible. Like editors were afraid of editing the golden boy and had so many things that in a place like this would not fly. Yet that is the thing with genius, you push, you push. It’s not seeking perfection, but seeking that special place where you say Wow.

Jacksavage

A carpenter can knock a table together in a couple of hours and sell it for five hundred pounds.

An artisan can build the table and spend a week carving intricate designs into it and sell it for 10,000 pounds.

Neither way is wrong. Both ways earn money. Up to the author which they would rather be.

Perfectionism is different to care and attention to detail. Nothing will ever be perfect, not until it is AI made, but then it wont have a soul, cos that lies in imprefection.

Perfectly imperfect. A bloody good book. That is enough for me.

Gurgmaster

Like all things in life, good words about fighting against mediocrity can be twisted into a form of extremism that is damaging.

The literal meaning of mediocre and the interpretation of the term ‘mediocre’ can cause external and internal conflict. Mediocre can be quite good - it’s a broad range in the middle. Many interpret it though as an insult.

Some writers I’ve met on here have inflated views of their abilities, but many more have a serious and misplaced lack of confidence in their writing. Many seem to be on a quest to write a book that’s ‘more perfect’ than many best sellers. I think they can be inclined to seek silly targets.
I’d encourage some of them to do a harsh critique in the manner in which they see their own work on a novel by Patterson, Cussler, King or Rowling and I will bet they will find some ‘scary’ issues
So like most things - great advice in the right context. Cheers

Vidyut

I suppose it depends on what you’re trying to do. If you’re trying to put a once in a lifetime inspiring idea out, you want to get it excellent. If you’re trying to churn out five books a year and have a sustainable livelihood, “good enough” may be an excellent goal.

I’ve never felt tempted to do anything others could duplicate. For me, the perfectionism works, because I’m putting out something complex that takes time to get all the ducks lined up in a way that meets my goals.

I think a lot of the bad rap perfectionism gets is from its association with writer’s block, where you’re so preemptively judgmental, you can’t get started. But that has little to do with when you stop. If anything, most submissions are “finishing” their text too early here with poor plot pacing, scenes that don’t work, plot points that aren’t set up or don’t land, plots without enough complexity to justify a book, but are perfectly proofed and ‘ready’ - it makes them very resentful of suggestions for major changes because they’ve already put finishing effort on a poor scene. Telling such a person they need to remove half the descriptions at a minimum and add more sub-plots, nuance, complexity, better rounded characters, etc gets you blocked, because most critters will read line by line and find few faults, so they think you’re just jealous of their genius or something. Or outright malicious, pulling them down to seem smart, etc.

The gloss makes it seem “good enough”. It is extremely hard to convince such people that their work being typo free and without actual “errors” doesn’t mean it is good as a story. That is the presentation. The plot still needs to excel for a book to be memorable.

I believe the CC euphemism for this is “I’m not your target reader”. lol.

The handful who will take apart a scene and rebuild it better if you give them a good reason are easy to recognise - each iteration of the work reads dramatically better. If you begin reading because you’re critting, by the time it ends, you’re sold on the story. Most will “tweak” the text to get rid of outright flags in the crits and call it a day - and that’s evident in revised versions too. The scene hasn’t really improved, it is just hiding the evidence to appear smooth - this won’t work when reading the book as a whole when the story simply fails to deliver for where it is in the plot. The writing is polished, but the story isn’t strong enough. The characters don’t jump off the page till you feel like you KNOW them, can predict what they’d do in a situation that’s never in the book. The story plods along, but there’s little to provoke thought, make you read it a second time.

That’s what ‘good enough’ does. That idea that you put enough work to make it past a relatively low bar rather than dig in deep and build from the ground up to leverage your story in every way you can.

I usually write expecting my book to be read several times with new insights for repeat readers revealing new layers of the plot. And on an average, based on crits, beta reads, reader emails and reviews, I’d say about 20% of the readers end up reading it more than once. This isn’t where I want to be - I want to be the author they’ll keep returning to, maybe reading each book 10 times for at least 80% (because 100% seems too arrogant to assume), but it is a good start. For that, I need to write in enough depth for the readers to dig in without finding inconsistencies. That takes a hell of a lot of engineering. Good enough is never going to get me there.

Sando

I think it totally depends on your personality. For some people it’s learning that perfect is an impossible goal, and giving themselves permission to stop. For others, it’s pushing themselves harder to get the best they can.

Also, there’s a difference between putting the hard graft in, polishing the piece, rewriting, improving…and sanding so hard that you take off not just the rough edges, but the essential imperfections that make something interesting. The master craftsperson knows when to take off a little more, or push on to get that shape just so…one size doesn’t fit all.

Lvocem

Actually, I agree with everything you said. Yet, as you also indicated perfectionism, has been the cause of many people to stop writing, while it has allowed you go deeper in your craft.
Perhaps the problem is not the pursue, but what it does to the person in a particular stage of their creative pursuit.
Take for instance most of literature and music of the nineteenth century. They had achieved perfection in every sense of the word. Then photography is invented and you cannot get more perfect than that. So what does that do? Art went for imperfect, for raw edges, the ugly. And in the process of destroying that perception of reality you end up with the Guernica. Take for instance music, what we call classical music, which then it begins to get influences from African culture and music. It evolved into big band, Jazz. But still very rigid, until it’s blown out of the water with Blues, Rock & Roll, and why sing when you can talk, thus rap, which in it’s own way goes back to poetry. In literature all the romanticism of the nineteenth century is obliterated by the modernism of works like Metamorphosis, or the meandering extreme of consciousness of Faulkner, or the everyday stupidity of life of Ulysses, or the plain simple sentences of Hemingway.

This flux is not the pursue of perfection or perfect, but the pursue of differentiation. I came from advertising and there was a saying by Dole Dale & Burnback that said “differentiate or die.”
So look at the Beatles. They started writing pop songs. All perfect little ballads that drove all the girls crazy. Until that was not good enough. They threw all that away when they did Sargent Pepper and experimented. In other words, they were willing to fail, screw up, shatter all preconceive notions of perfection and build brick by bloody melodic brick a new paradigm.
The problem with perfection is that once you’ve achieved it, then what? Look at Hemingway. Many scholars argue what what did Hemingway in was that he felt he could not do work to the level of Hemingway anymore. He was afraid of failure and between his own depression and that pressure the shotgun was his only friend.

There’s a saying that goes, you have to learn all the rules, so you can learn how to break them. Just pursuing perfection will not achieve that. You need to then transcend. And discover that place where your own work becomes that.

Vidyut

I find that interesting from another perspective, because while I’m a staunch critic of SDT, one of my repeated suggestions is to write distinction rather than description. What makes this character unique. Write ONLY those descriptions. Delete all else if possible for strongest development. It doesn’t matter if the description is visual or auditory or pure distilled concepts or an orgy of unadulterated telling. Write what makes it interesting and different from everything else.

An action/description that could apply to anybody/thing should be deleted except as a last resort. This has got me blocked by quite a few people for rude comments. (I think my worst was “If you take out all the dialogue, your characters are twitching meaninglessly like a cockroach that just won’t die.” - that one didn’t get me blocked though. The author fixed the scene and it was awesome.)

Often I don’t want to develop a tangent too much. Shallow descriptions help turn it quickly into a dead end (or have the reader not look closely so I can blindside them later). So it legit horrifies me that what I use to kill off interest is used in the belief it enhances characters.

As a general process, distinguish to add interest, genericify to remove it. If your characters are into generics (one verb shows: laughed, smiled, shook, sat, stood, winked… or moving body parts: hand shook, gaze tracked, jaw ticked, whatever twitched) - you are murdering characters, unless you’ve developed those specific things as that character’s traits (and no other).

Edit: It isn’t easy and my own submissions are full of garbage. Except they won’t be published like that. I know I have to fix it - they are placeholders. And I’ll never ever be offended by garbage being called garbage. My garbage doesn’t make it rose-scented.

Lvocem

I used to teach in an advertising school. A key of my philosophy was don’t be afraid of failing, of putting out shit. It is worse to play it safe. Take that chance and then clean up, edit, delete, but go out there and fail. To create an award winning rose, you have to start with manure.