Every artists knows you don’t make the things you make, you submit to the things you make.
Andrew Klavan
Took me a while to get here, but I’ve finished my preliminary review of Residuum. Ever since I got it into my thick skull that I needed to facilitate a return to focusing on my creative works and fostering talks about them, it’s been easier to focus on the task at hand. Imagine that, playing to my known strengths / needs. Who would have thought?
Anyway, I planned to go over the whole thing with a broad brush. The plan was to stay at a high level, see the story as a whole, see the character’s motivations and arcs, and find the flaws that needed fixing. I knew there’d be some – nothing is perfect – but I was hoping the story as a whole had strong enough bones to keep its structure under scrutiny. And, well, I think that’s true… largely depending on your definition of bones, I suppose.
Something had been nagging at me while I read through the first half of the novel and I couldn’t quite place my finger on it. Until, that is, I hit that midpoint, and that unscratchable itch came to the forefront. Once I saw the problem, there was really no un-seeing it, which got me thinking of what my next steps should be and, ultimately, about whether the problem in all this is me.
Those who have been a part of my writing journey from near it’s beginning can attest to a glaring problem I have – I always allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good. This isn’t limited to my writing, either, it’s in all sorts of places in my life. When I pick something up, I want it to come out the best it can possibly be. When it ultimately doesn’t, because nothing is perfect, I either get frustrated with it and move on or head back to the drawing board. That, along with my ever-present fear of failure, is what’s kept me from finishing so many projects.
And now, here I am once again, staring that problem in the face. The worst thing about it is that the critiques themselves are perfectly valid. I’m not making up the things that need fixing, of that I’m certain. The fixes seem right as well. However, they’re a lot. Grand, sweeping changes that address motive and mindset early on and will change whole events and milestones later. All that leads me to asking myself a very familiar question – am I doing this because it’s required, or because I found another excuse to not be done?
No creative work is ever finished, after all. Nothing’s ever truly done. There are always tweaks, always polish that could be applied wherever we look. We, as creators, simply decide that it’s at a place acceptable to our standard and let it out into the world to be scrutinized and hopefully accepted. It’s a treadmill, and we’re the only ones who can decide when it’s time to step off and move on. But how do we do that, when the flaws in our work our so apparent to us? Judgment calls, nothing more. It’s terrifying to understand that. There are no hard answers in creative works. Only whims.
So, what do I do? Do I accept where things are, make polishing edits, and try to find agents? Or, do I take out the next fresh notebook, let the emptiness of the page grab hold of me, and outline what these new ideas will do to this story?
I think, in the end, I’ve been trying to talk myself out of doing what I know needs to be done. Trying to tell myself that my overbearing focus on perfection is getting in the way of being done, and that the story as it stands isn’t broken enough to need this much of a fix. Because I want to be done. I really, truly want to be done. I want, at last, to send off a story that I think is publish-worthy. Something that an agent will pick up, love, and help me bring to the world.
And that’s just it… this isn’t there. Not yet. Delen’s journey doesn’t yet ring true, and it must. It will. I’ll make certain of that.
Once more unto the breach, Dwellers.
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