The Glory of Imperfection
(and a Best American Essays amazing example of a writer being totally “on purpose” with interiority
Confession: I am a perfectionist who no longer has the time (or the requisite sharp eyesight) to be perfect at just about anything. So in this post, I’m going to tell you all about the bomb of perfectionism, including what it has to do with writing, and how you can defuse it. The instructions for defusing will include a strange and detailed writing prompt, one that is both powerful and fun and can yield glorious results. I’m also going to give you an incredibly helpful example of a writer using interiority (thoughts, feelings, explanations) on purpose in an essay selected by Alexander Chee for the 2022 Best American Essays collection. This example is directly related to one of the points I made in my recent craft essay on revision:
Readers sent me so much great feedback on that essay—much or even most of it related to the point on interiority—that I was overjoyed when, during my bedtime reading of the Best American Essays 2022 last night, I stumbled on an example so precise, so crystalline, that it could not be missed, even at eleven-thirty on the night before a blizzard.
Okay, back to perfectionism. Like I said, I’ve sort of run out of time for being perfect these days. I am overscheduled, overcommitted, overbooked, and overtired. My eyesight is deteriorating at about the same rate with which my calendar is overstuffing itself with everything from my full-time University work, my busy and beloved independent teaching and editing practice, this beautiful newsletter (I do find it beautiful!), our amazing and complicated family with its six grown children plus their partners and five delightfully sticky grandchildren (ages five and under, including a two-year-old foster son with our youngest child, who happens to be single, so … an all-hands-on-deck situation). I’m married, too—a couple of decades into that project and I’d like to keep it afloat. Oh, and last but not least, we have a dog named Frannie who totally owns us. So, despite my inclination to want things just so, I am finding, increasingly, that if I want to finish anything at all, I must accept a certain possible margin of error. It’s maddening.
It's also surprisingly instructive and transformative.
What I’m learning is that my perfectionism, which stretches back to childhood, is rooted in the deep, permeating fear of “getting in trouble.” Of someone finding out “who I really am.” Of being exposed as the one “to blame.” It’s childhood trauma grounded in the experience of a house filled with what the poet Robert Hayden so aptly described as “chronic angers.” Those angers flowed like vapors through the years of my growing up, erupting regularly but unpredictably. Yes, I’ve learned this before, of course. I’m fifty-four years old. But isn’t it funny, how life’s biggest lessons continually resurface, demanding to be learned again, like a particularly intricate and challenging piano concerto or a language we haven’t spoken in years? One of the ways I re-learn the roots of my perfectionism, and reject them, is by making small-scale mistakes and discovering repeatedly that … it is fine.
The world does not stop spinning. My house does not fall down. The University does not let me go. My students do not flee. Because in general, I’m a super hard worker with rigorous standards, so, when I make a mistake (an occasional stupid typo, for example, or a mixed-up call time) people see it for what it is: human. They don’t assume I’m sloppy, careless, or incompetent. This is so freeing to understand. I mean, I don’t want to make mistakes, don’t get me wrong. I’d still rather be perfect. But I also don’t want to be unable to execute a task or reach for a goal just because I’m terrified of getting something wrong.
Here's a quick, recent, and super clear example of how my efforts at shedding perfectionism are paying off for me. It has to do with the Eleven Things post, which I published Sunday night. I wanted to send it to everyone—paid and free subscribers—as a free gift for being part of my writing community in 2022. But I’ve only been on Substack for six weeks, and I’m still learning. So, when I went through the publication process, I didn’t notice that Substack had—even though I’d selected all subscribers—reverted it somehow to paid only. I saw that a couple of hours after the email went out. It was so frustrating. There’s no way to change an email once it goes out! The only way I knew how to make sure the post got to everyone was to … send it again. I worried though that if it had the same subject line, people wouldn’t open it. What to do? I wasn’t sure, but didn’t have the luxury of time to find out, since I figured the longer I waited to send this duplicate email, the fewer readers would open it, since more of them would already have opened the first, paywalled version. So, I decided the simplest solution (though wildly inelegant) was to add the label “CORRECTED” to the headline. Talk about a blaring announcement of imperfection. I also added a note to the essay explaining what had happened. None of these solutions were perfect (far from it), but they were the best fixes I could think of for sharing this writing wisdom with everyone rather than a select few. The only out of my mistake was to announce it.
What happened? Wonderful things. I got emails and texts and messages from writers far and wide thanking me for the post. Brevity picked it up and distributed it through their blog and newsletter. Writers on Twitter and Facebook shared it generously, one of them saying it was the best advice on creative nonfiction she’d read all year. As it got passed from writer to writer, something else happened, too. Folks started subscribing to this Substack. More than 200 of them and counting. That’s a lot of new subscriptions in a couple of days for a relatively unknown Substack writer. All because I decided it was okay (err, okay enough) to make a mistake and re-send the post with that great big all caps CORRECTED label.
Most of us face some degree of perfectionism and fear in our creative practice. In part, that’s because making art is audacious in the first place. What if we’re not good at it? What if our writing sucks? What if we’re boring, or self-centered, or amateur? What if we write in ways that are cliched, overwrought, saccharine, or clumsy? What if the story we want to tell just doesn’t matter to anyone? Most of my writing students wrestle with some or many of these fears some or most of the time. This week’s writing exercise is a zany one meant to break down some of those fears by leaning all the way into and eventually right through them. I’ll give the exercise now, and after that, I’ll show you the example from BAE of how a writer can use interiority so intentionally that we cannot possibly miss his intent and the skill with which he executes it. When I’ve given this exercise in my Writing in the Dark workshop, the results have consistently surprised us with their ingenuity—and some of them have even led to publication. So, have some fun and expect nothing but “absolute rubbish,” even while knowing that rubbish is also compost from which glorious things sometimes grow.
Writing Prompt: The Glory of Imperfection