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 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.

Mailer, Democracy and Huckleberry Finn

Norman Mailer’s The Spooky Art (2003) is a rattlebag of memoir, criticism and testosterone-fuelled opinion (sensitive readers might wish to skip his piece on Last Tango in Paris), one of the highlights of which is the essay ‘Huckleberry Finn – Alive at 100’, which concludes like this:

What else is greatness but the indestructible wealth it leaves in the mind’s recollection after hope has soured and our passions are spent? It is always the hope of democracy that our wealth will be there to spend again, and the ongoing treasure of Huckleberry Finn is that it frees us to think of democracy and its sublime, terrifying premise: Let the passions and cupidities and dreams and kinks and ideals and greed and hopes and foul corruptions of all men and women have their day and the world will still be better off, for there is more good than bad in the sum of us and our workings. Mark Twain, whole embodiment of that democratic human, understood the premise in every turn of his pen, and how he tested it, how he twisted and tantalized and tested it until we are weak all over again with our love for the idea. – Norman Mailer, The Spooky Art

On Cliché and the Reader-Writer Contract

A sure sign that a writer has yet to develop confidence in his or her use of language, and perhaps the most obvious, is the use of cliché. But which is worse: the unintended cliché, or the one deliberately used?
 A cliché used unintentionally, simply because the phrase has become so polished by popular use that it slips unnoticed through the beginning writer’s neural network, is just about forgivable – let’s call it a venial sin. A minor offence, and one more to be pitied than censured (is ‘more pitied that censured’ a cliché?); moreover, it’s a fault that can be easily remedied, providing the writer is willing to bear down and pay close attention, and be worthy of the words they choose.
 A cliché used deliberately, on the other hand, can only be regarded as the blackest of mortal sins. For the writer who chooses to employ hackneyed phrases, and with malice aforethought to boot, there can be no forgiveness nor redemption; for such writers there is only Dante’s inferno, suspended somewhere in the outer dark between levels seven (violence against neighbours and/or God) and eight (fraud and deception).
 The beginning writer, of course, might feel that this is all rather strong stuff, and that the occasional lapse into platitude might even be expected – there must be a reason, after all (possibly because they contain their kernel of truth), why clichés became clichés in the first place.
 The issue for the experienced reader, however, is overly familiar phrases are bum notes; and should they go clanging and banging about in our inner ear, we will immediately know that the writer-reader contract is being violated. Implicit in the writer-reader relationship is the idea that, should a reader choose to read a particular book, she will be offered a new way of seeing the world, or at the very least get a distinctive perspective on whatever subject the writer has chosen to offer. Clichés are the laziest kind of plagiarism, and a very strong hint that the writer is more interested in sounding like a writer than being an actual writer, which is to say delivering original insights derived from the writer’s unique take on the world.

Writing Advice: Highsmith, Plotting and (Re)Living Your Dreams

One of the main issues that tends to come up when I’m teaching creative writing is that of plot – as in, many new and aspiring writers generally believe that they don’t know how to plot and/or tell a story. And it’s no use telling them that they’ve been listening to stories since before they knew they were listening to stories, or that they have been absorbing plots ever since they first started watching TV, or that our species thrived, evolutionarily speaking, because our minds are hardwired to think in narrative terms. Most new writers are conditioned to believe that the secret to great writing is plotting, and they’re depending on me to reveal the great secret.
 There is no great secret, of course, but because people appreciate concrete detail and examples, I’m very happy to break down the basic plot mechanics and talk about seven-point plot arcs (other plot arcs are available) – I tend to use Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley as a case study, because (a) it’s a brilliant book and (b) it allows for a neat contrast between the novel and Anthony Minghella’s film due to one crucial scene change (no spoilers, etc.) in Minghella’s adaptation.
 And then, at the end of that class, I’ll give them a task: remember a dream and write down as much of it as you can, trying to capture its weirdness and bright colours and its random twists and turns (if you dream in seven-point plot arcs, so much the better).
 Some of them follow through on this homework, some of them don’t (some people, like me, rarely remember their dreams). And some of the results can be fantastic. But none of the results are anywhere near as fantastic as the wild idea that humans are so hardwired to tell stories that we do it even when we’re asleep; that even when we’re unconscious, we’re still telling ourselves stories.
 Do we know how and why it happens? I’ll wager that most of us don’t, and – unless the dreams become traumatising nightmares – we don’t much care. And in this context it really doesn’t matter. All that matters is that we understand we already know everything we know about the storytelling basics at the unconscious level; that we appreciate and accept that, in our most fundamental sense of self, we are storytelling beings.

Writing as Conversation: Exactly Who Are You Talking To?

As a teenager with (very) vague ambitions to be a writer, I surprised and gratified to be taken seriously by my Uncle Jim (that’s him on the right, in a self-portrait). I didn’t get to see Jim very often, because he lived on other side of the country, but he was the family’s resident intellectual – a designer with Waterford Glass, an amateur painter, and as well-read as he was well-travelled. I vividly recall a rainy spring afternoon when I was 14 or thereabouts: Jim had come to visit for a few days, and we spent the afternoon sitting in front of the fire having a long, rambling conversation about books, writing and all that jazz. The following day he went off for a walk and came back with a second-hand copy of Ulysses (he hadn’t been able to find a new copy anywhere in town), into which he’d slipped an encouraging note written on brown wrapping paper.
 I still have that note, and that copy of Ulysses. Over the years it became something of a totem for me, a touchstone, a tangible article of faith, even it would be years before I finally gathered to courage to read it. More importantly, though, I still have that memory of being taken seriously as a writer, which is why Jim’s self-portrait hangs above my desk. Because no matter what book I’m working on, and regardless of its genre, it’s always my Uncle Jim I’m talking to.
 When you’re starting out telling a story, focusing on a single person can be hugely helpful in terms of pinning down exactly what it is you’re trying to say, and why, and the best way to say it (i.e., the narrative voice). That person could be a friend or your sister, a writer you’d like to impress or some philistine from your past you desperately want to prove wrong. It might even be your own uncle, long gone but still a friendly presence at your elbow. But it doesn’t really matter who that person is, just so long as you feel you can speak directly to them as you tell your story.
 The most concise version of this idea came to me courtesy of the wonderful PD James, which I came across in her short but brilliant non-fiction title Talking about Detective Fiction:

“A book is a conversation with a reader, singular; not readers; have an ideal reader in mind; regardless of first-person or third-person voice, you’re telling that story to one person.” – PD James

 If you find yourself stuck in your writing, or struggling to get started, try this: stop writing, pick someone you know will care, and start telling them the story in the way you know they’ll like best. You’ll be amazed at how quickly the words start to come.