Getting the text right, or moving forward

For the first six years I was teaching here in Norway, one of my primary roles was Learning Support, which is a role we don’t quite have in the US–in a US context, learning support is special education work with students who have specific, documented learning differences, coupled with what we would call in the US something like “general academic support,” in which any student, regardless of any documented learning need, can come for help with academic skills.

Perfectionism in school

In that learning support role, one of the topics I spent the most time supporting students with was perfectionism. Many students found themselves tinkering on a piece of work for hours and hours, or even were unwilling to turn in work because they thought it was not good enough. This perfectionism often had real consequences–students missed deadlines, even when their work was (to an outside observer) complete; there was also a knock-on effect, as other assignments and studying were pushed aside as the one assignment ballooned to fill their time; perhaps the most significant consequence (or at least it felt to me) was the student’s academic self-esteem–the more time they poured into that work, the more they doubted. Sometimes, things seemed hopeless.

Over the years, I built a lot of skill at helping students recognize perfectionism like this and make changes. We talked about how they felt about their work, about what consequences they feared for turning in something “not good enough,” we made agreements about time limits they would keep for themselves, we talked about the value of trusting an outside eye who could say, “It’s ready to hand in.” We weren’t always successful. Perfectionism is often one part of a deeper set of anxieties, and many students I was working with were also benefitting from support from more focused, professional counseling. But I could see the patterns in students’ attitudes towards their work and how they spent their study time. It wasn’t a good thing.

Perfectionism in writing

Sometimes it’s hard to take your own advice. And that’s something I’ve been thinking about these days, as I have found myself tinkering and poring over the opening two scenes of my current novel project. I went back to make some changes after some recent writing group feedback–there was an element I realized needed adding, but when I went to insert the new material, I found it didn’t fit. I needed to change this and that. The energy had shifted. The new paragraphs were bulky and changed the tone of the piece. I rewrote from the beginning. The more I rewrote, the more problems I saw–this sentence isn’t specific enough. This word has the wrong connotation. This part isn’t going to make sense to anyone but me. It’s bad. It’s a mess. It’s not good enough, and it probably won’t ever be.

Perfectionism isn’t new to me. As I look back over my own education and professional life, I think it’s something I’ve carried with me for as long as I remember. In school, things tended to work out for me well, because I had strong academic skills that meant that when I turned in my work, I usually got back a good grade–I found the positive feedback I was craving. Things are different in the professional world, and they are especially stark in the world of writing: when the vast majority of short story submissions come back as rejections, it is easy to interpret that as failure and easy to question the merit of your work. Perfectionism looks like the answer–if I can just get this right, if I can just have the perfect word here, everything will be fine.

So I have seen this before in myself. And the tricky thing is that I think my attention to detail in my work is one of my strengths. I think I actually write quite well. But I also notice that the more I tinker, the more problems I see, the more stuck I become. I get lost in details and struggle to see the forest for the trees. Like the assignment my student should have turned in two weeks ago but is still fiddling with, my one paragraph has ballooned to become everything. I become sad. I doubt. The project as a whole feels insurmountable. It will never get done.

Making forward progress, and the difficulties in that

There’s a problem with the other side too. I have sometimes been able to embrace the ethos of the “shitty first draft,” to just throw every idea I have down and keep moving forward at all costs. This was something that actually often helped students who found themselves unable to start an assignment, which, unless they are really lacking knowledge about how to complete the work, is usually perfectionism in another form. I suggested in this case that they try banning themself from the delete key: you can go back and edit after you have ideas down on the page. This is true in writing too–it’s often much easier to see what is needed in a story once material is written out. And yet the problem that I’ve found is this: I’ve actually written a full draft of this novel I’m now tinkering over, but after doing so, I found that fundamental elements of the story were not working. I found I had spent a long time on a novel that was not ultimately what it needed to be.

What happens in Chapter 2 has to grow out of Chapter 1. I do believe I need a handle on one scene before I can write the next. And this is perhaps the belief that keeps me tinkering–I have to get this right, because if the first scene isn’t right, then the second one certainly won’t be.

But the truth is, it works the other way too. What is the best form of Chapter 1? In many ways I can’t know until I’ve seen Chapter 2 and I can use Chapter 1 to set it up. Everything in the novel exists at once. Time moves in both directions. So what I need is balance.

Balance

The last day or so, I have been trying to move forward. I’m reminding myself of the old phrase I wrote here in a blog post a couple of years ago, one that my mom really liked and ended up printing out and pasting on the wall over her desk (maybe this perfectionism runs in the family a bit…). It was just, “let good enough be good enough.” When the whole novel is done, I’ll come back and put the opening in its final form. I think I can get it good enough now to move forward.

What do you think about this tension between “getting it right” from the beginning and the forward momentum needed to complete a project? How do you handle this in your own work?

Thanks for stopping by, and best wishes,
Jimmy