Perfection is the thief of joy

I worked with a reporter who always filed his copy on time. He was done. He was proud of being done. And on time. Except he had to check one last fact. He had to land one last quote. He just had to write a new lede or a more satisfying ending.

Editor: So you aren’t done.

Reporter: Oh no, I’m done. Except for one more thing.

This man suffered from perfectionism. This is surprising, because he worked for a newspaper and his life was deadlines. The surest way to defeat perfectionism is to face a deadline.

Where do you go to get a deadline?

If you’re a writer, you will have to create your own deadline. For example: I will finish the second draft of my novel by Dec. 31.

Or you can meet an editor’s deadline. There’s always a contest somewhere, or a special issue, or an editorial call for something only you can write.

Of course, unless you’re working for an employer where they have the power to fire your procrastinating ass, there is no penalty for missing your deadline. The coffee shop to which I sometimes flee will put coffee in front of me in January if I’m still working on my novel. This is a mind game, and the game is being played in your mind.

So let’s win it.

I recommend that you pick a realistic date to work toward. And when that date arrives, your story or novel or creative nonfiction hybrid is done. If you have to check one last fact, land one last quote, or rewrite every fucking thing, then your story isn’t done. It may never be done, because you will never be perfect.

Unless you are writing solely for an audience of one (you), it is now time to submit what you wrote to the test of the market.

Always remember Richie and Carl, the school board administrators in Community. After reviewing a new commercial for their pathetic school, Carl says with satisfaction, “It’s better than good. It’s good enough.”

Make your work as good as you can and then shove it out the door. Move on to your next idea, your next project, your next obsession. If an editor wants some improvements, that editor will ask for them. They are not shy.

The suspense and thriller writer Dean R. Koontz once said that he rewrites every page dozens of times before moving to the next page. I am not going to argue with Koontz, who has published more than 100 books while I am struggling with up to one (1) book. Perfectionism works for him. But for the rest of us…frankly, we don’t have that kind of time. We have a deadline.

Keep reading poetry. Builds fiber.

My publishing career began on this date in 1978. The following poem has been trapped on yellowing newsprint for 48 years. Run free, poem:

Poem to Be Named Later

The interleague trading deadline was

approaching for the American

and National Poetry Leagues. The

Sioux City Shakespeares and the Wichita

Whitmans were working on an eight-poem deal

involving three epic narratives,

two speedy blank verse ballads, two

sexy limericks, and a love poem

in iambic pentameter. The

deadline drew near but still the Sioux City

front office wasn’t satisfied.

After all, they had led both leagues in

allusive alliteration the

year before. They wanted more. The Whitmans

needed some good defensive back-up poems

that could also hit with power. So

at the last moment they threw in an

undisclosed amount of rhyming

dictionaries and a poem to be named

later. You are now reading the poem

to be named later. It stayed two seasons

with the Shakespeares, most of the time sitting

on the bench, before being sent down to

the Biscayne Byrons in the double-A

Couplet League. Last winter it retired

from pro poetry and went to work in

the accounting department of a bank

in Fort Lauderdale. They never did

get around to naming it.

Copyright © 1978 by Steven Bryan Bieler. Appeared in the Fall 1978 “Sex & Sports” issue of Dark Horse magazine, not Dark Horse Comics and not the song by Katy Perry.

Procrastination is the thing with feathers

Decades ago, at the highest levels of tournament chess, after six or more hours of exhausting play, it was time to adjourn. The master with the turn in hand wrote his move on a piece of paper, sealed it in an envelope, and handed it to the all-powerful arbiter.

The master’s seconds would spend the night working on all possible variations stemming from the sealed move. The opponent’s seconds would try to guess the move in the envelope and work out a defense or a counterattack. The two players would sleep, unless the guy who sealed the move realized he had screwed up. Then it was the sacred job of his seconds to prevent him from jumping out a window.

The next day, the arbiter would open the envelope and the master would make the move he had written down the day before. Many a game was adjourned two or three times. Chess, like the Cold War, went on forever.

None of this mishegoss happens anymore. Today, if your game goes into extra innings, there are rules to guarantee that you will finish the game on the day you started the game.

In writing, procrastination is something like adjournment. You get lost in the writing and suddenly realize you have to stop. Your boss insists you come to work, your kids insist on being fed, your partner insists that you go to therapy together. Or the clock was sucked into a time warp and it’s suddenly 2 a.m. You hit SAVE or cap your pen or throw something over the typewriter to keep the dust or the cat off.

What have you written? Have you written anything? Have you been staring? At a sheet of paper, a bird in flight, the wall in front of you?

Been there.

The only thing I don’t have in procrastination that the masters had in adjournment is my team of trusty seconds. If only Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, and F. Scott Fitzgerald could huddle around my manuscript with their felt-tip markers, drinking too much coffee while recalculating my plot and character arcs.

“Get some sleep,” Emily says to me. “You must start early—and take your dogs.”

Procrastination, in my experience, is no big deal. It’s your brain working behind the scenes, under the hood, beyond the horizon, above the clouds. Your brain needs more time. When your brain is ready, your brain will write. You’ll find a god in every golden cloister.

My revision of my novel slowed this past week as it dawned on me just how much rewriting will be involved in my revision. I am not simply re-imagining my original vision; I am writing thousands of words to create the new vision. It sounds tiring. It is tiring. It’s supposed to be.

Back to work, people!

The writer I wish I were

I became aware of myself as a writer at the age of 11, in Mr. Gray’s sixth-grade English class. Every Friday was Composition Day. It was our challenge to write something there at our desks, on our ruled paper, and read it before the class. Some Fridays, we had an assignment, or what today would be called a prompt. On other Fridays, we were free to write whatever we wanted.

On those Fridays in that long-ago year I discovered three things: I could write under pressure to meet a deadline. I had zero stage fright. And my fellow sixth-graders enjoyed hearing what I had written and often broke into applause.

What did I write back then? I wish I had kept those smudged pages. I can still visualize what they looked like, just as I can see certain positions I found myself in on the chess board no matter how much time passes. I wrote whatever the day’s assignment required, and when I had no one to answer to but myself I wrote about my family. They were always good for a laugh, especially if I added Martians, robots, and outfielders.

In those days, the writers I wanted to be were the writers I read: Ray Bradbury, Andre Norton, C.S. Forester, and whoever wrote the boys’ baseball books starring such stalwart sluggers as Ace Atkins. If I had started writing at the age of 6, they might have been Crockett Johnson (Harold and the Purple Crayon) and Robert McCloskey (Make Way for Ducklings). As I grew up and the conviction I wanted to write grew stronger, I imagined myself writing like Thomas Wolfe, Charles Dickens, and W. Somerset Maugham. And then Margie Percy, John Updike, Franz Kafka, and Ursula K. Le Guin.

When Michael Cunningham sits down to write his next novel, he has a vision of what the novel will be: “vast and revelatory and awe-inspiring. It’s a cathedral made of fire.” But:

Even if the book in question turns our fairly well, it’s never the book you’d hoped to write. It’s smaller than the book you’d hoped to write. It’s an aggregation of sentences. It doesn’t remotely resemble a cathedral made of fire. It feels, in short, like an insufficient translation of a mythical work.

Cunningham calls this “one of the heartbreaks of writing fiction.” Another is the knowledge that you’ll never be Ursula K. Le Guin or even Crockett Johnson. Though I believe I would’ve done a creditable job with baby ducks trying to cross a damn road.

Cunningham, in Unsayable: A Life in Writing, which is an autobiography with writing advice or a writing manual with some memoir, knows exactly what I’m trying to say:

Writing is difficult enough without adding the imperative to evolve into the writer you wish you were.

To all of you out there who are writing here in my end-of-the-year writing challenge (I should’ve thought of a better name for this), keep writing. Be kind to yourselves. And read Unsayable, which was just published. The author provides the encouragement we all need…plus drag queens and ghost stories. I would like to have seen Thomas Wolfe try that.

Thank you, Franklin A. Gray, English teacher extraordinaire. When I read his obituary, I discovered that he had also been a radio announcer under the name “The Shadow.” Rest in power.

Thank God It’s Monday 20

Tonight: A brief word about pencils.

But first, our dog Tango, a noted corgi. Early this evening, on the deserted (I thought) campus of Western Washington University, she surprised a six-point whitetail deer and chased it for a quarter of a mile. Spoiler alert: The deer escaped.

Tango’s behavior taught me never to let her off the leash on campus again. But it also, in a weird way, reminded me of my Dad and how we both loved office supplies. When I was in high school and we found out that a local “stationery store” was having a going-out-of-business sale, we RAN to the car. We chased bargains, not ruminants.

Most office-supply stores today belong to a chain and everyone sells the same thing, but with different packaging and different celebrity endorsers. The last time a stationery store in my area expired, it was 20 years ago, we lived in Portland, Oregon, and the treasure I came home with was the colorful stickers we stuck on floppy disks in the 1980s.

Before Dad went to that great office-supply ammunition dump in the sky, he gave me all of the unopened boxes of pencils he had accumulated since he came home from World War II. I ended up donating many to an elementary school; a teacher there told me that his third- and fourth-graders chewed right through them. I sold other pencils on eBay. I still have enough to last me my lifetime.

There’s something about pencils, and their fragrance, that makes you happy. Like skipping stones. You can’t skip a stone and not be happy. You can’t open a box of pencils and not feel happy looking at all that unsharpened potential.

Two writers who have meant a lot to me, Thomas Wolfe and John Updike, wrote with pencils.

Wolfe, who was six and a half feet tall, used the top of a refrigerator as his desk. His preferred tool was a pencil almost as thick as a crayon. He scrawled 20 or 25 words on a page, then swept the page off the fridge and started on the next.

Updike, who liked to sit in a chair, wrote Couples and three of the four Rabbit books with a pencil.

Am I going to write the next draft of my novel with a pencil? How about hell no? I have about the same chance of finishing such a thing as I have of catching a deer.

I didn’t write this post with a pencil, either, but I did use a pencil (a Wolkins “Debut”) to write my to-do list today. And I’m now using a pencil (a red PMC Tailoring Pencil No. 249, proudly made in the U.S.A.) to cross out BLOG.

“Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.” (G.K. Chesterton)

I believe in starts

I needed a bench to cut wood using my handsaw. I wanted something low enough that I could hold the material in place with my foot but not so low that the tip of my saw would strike the floor of the garage. I mocked up this invention with cardboard, then bought some scrap wood at The RE Store, our local, one-stop, scrap-wood emporium.

Then I was sidetracked by other things—that is, life.

One day I decided I needed a bench to cut wood using my handsaw. While thinking this over in our garage, I spotted a rectangle of plywood that was the exact size I wanted for this project. I had already measured the damn thing and bought the wood. Yes, the Enterprise was once again stuck in a time loop.

Before I could drink enough coffee to gear up for this project, my wife and I went to an estate sale where I discovered a wooden, slatted box from a wine distributor. It was sturdy and it was the approximate dimensions of the bench I had designed in my head. I turned it upside down and borrowed a bubble level that was on sale. The box didn’t wobble and the bottom was exactly level. I bought it. My project was done!

Back around Memorial Day, I decided to cut my novel up with a handsaw. In other words, I required a Big Think. When I picked the book up again last week, I had done my thinking, but I had forgotten which files I was using, and the file names I had concocted in May and June were somewhat opaque here in September. I can’t say if I was back in a time loop or if my brain required a defrag and disc clean-up, but this predicament forced me to engage with each file and understand them all over again. I’ll call that a win.

So my first week of the end-of-the-year writing challenge (I should’ve thought of a better name for this) turned out to be mostly some frantic reorganizing, but by the end of the week, I was writing. A slow start is still a start, and as Joey “The Lips” Fagan proclaimed in The Commitments, “I believe in starts.” He wasn’t talking about tomato plants, either.

Good luck to you as we lurch into Week 2!

Writing tip of the day

If one of your characters is working in a profession you know little about, listen to some podcasts. Podcasts are an insanely proliferating species. If two people are in the same career, you can be certain that one of them has begun a podcast about it and asked the other to make a guest appearance. This is the fastest way for you to gain this information.

Look over their episodes and search for titles such as “How to Be a Success in Your First 90 Days” or “Top 5 Mistakes to Avoid.”

Consumer warning: Most podcasters are not trained broadcasters. They speak too slowly, they say um, you know, and like like like. They’ll wander off the point and waste time. Also, shows about professions often degenerate into festivals of self-congratulation or tales of how we did things in the old days. That’s why God invented the Skip function. Use it!

Thank God It’s Monday 19

I know this is appropriation. Kokopeli belongs to someone else’s culture, not mine. I can’t resist him. He’s always messin’ ’round with his tricks. Unlike Secret Agent Man, who, according to the song, “Odds are he won’t live to see tomorrow,” Kokopeli will always be with us. He can’t wait to see what will happen next. If necessary, he’ll make something happen.

Kokopeli is all about aeronautics. It was no trouble for him to meet the Apollo astronauts on the Moon. I filled in his outline with a black marker to match the stark light and shadow contrasts.

Note the Lunar Rover in this 1969 postcard. Most shots of this vehicle were taken not at this distance but from close range.

After an adventure in space, a little wing-walking is easy. And if you think this is far-fetched, watch the documentary Man on Wire, about Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the Twin Towers in 1974.

This postcard, which is also from the late 1950s, was one of the last cards to be hand-painted from a black-and-white photo.

Tomorrow is September 1. Our tightrope challenge begins!

End-of-the-year writing challenge!

Greetings, writers. And when I say “writers,” I mean you. Yes, you.

  • Even if you’ve never published a thing and you’re still waiting for someone to say yes to your novel.
  • Even if your novel is still a first draft. I feel like my first draft is a drawer full of No. 2 pencils that need sharpening.
  • Even if what you have is a Word file you’ve thrown everything into, like a blender or a dumpster.
  • Even if the shapeless thing you have in your head exists only as scribbles on blue and yellow Post-its you stuck to your refrigerator.

Because we are all kicking it.

I often say that writers have one hobby in common: Complaining. This is not true. Our hobby is time management. We have plenty to do just getting ourselves and the people we love through the day. Archimedes, who was a writer just like us, said, “Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the world.” (We know this because Archimedes’ wife, Clarice, immediately wrote this down on a Post-it and stuck it to their fridge.) Time management is the lever we use to move the world and find precious time to write.

If what you want to do is write, and if you are still writing, even if it has been years since you embarked on this dream, then you are a success. Ray Bradbury said you only fail if you stop writing. And we know that because Clarice was visiting the Bradburys and she wrote that one down, too.

I have a 75,000-word first draft that I am still trying to revise. I haven’t made much progress since June, but John O’Hara never made much progress in the summer, either. He titled a collection of his stories Waiting for Winter because winter was when he wrote his novels. Like me, this famous novelist spent his summers surfin’, sunbathin’, and cruisin’ through the hamburger stand now.

August is about to end. School is about to start. Here in the U.S., the Labor Day weekend has always seemed to me to be invitation as irresistible as the finale from the William Tell Overture. We have four months until the end of year. I know that the world seems like shit right now, but let’s remember that people still lived their lives and loved who they loved and tried to be creative during both world wars and no end of plagues.

Turn your attention to the writing project that lights you up, even if you can only find 15 minutes a day for it. I want to report substantial progress by the time I climb into my tux for New Year’s Eve. I want you to report the same. Remember the words of writer and windsurfer Albert Camus: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”

Stand up on your hind legs and roar!

Thank God It’s Monday 18

It’s still summer, so here are two vacation shots.

Falling woman goes anywhere. Literally. To match the birds in flight, I used a black market to color her in. I love these silhouette cards, which are always from the beginning or the end of the day.

A typical wife at the beach. She’s about to turn to take the relay from the outfield. Stamping on photographs is tricky. I got lucky with this one.

I’ve been asked what stamp pads I recommend. For black, Versafine or Ranger. Versafine, made by Tsukineko, bills itself as “the longest lasting pigment inkpad available.” Ranger, from Ranger Industries, calls its pads “archival.” I’ve had excellent results with both. Versafine and Ranger pads are thick enough to stand above their plastic frame. That means you can ink up a rubber stamp image that’s larger than the pad itself.

Do NOT spend your money on stamp pads that are advertised for school or office. They don’t last. Even the U. S. Postal Service, which is not exactly a champion of technology, uses self-inking stamps.

At a recent estate sale I ran across a picnic table of art supplies. I picked up stamp pads I’ve never seen before: A deep-sea blue from Inkadinkado, a teal from MementoLuxe (also made by Tsukineko), and three weird colors, including “pesto” and “pool,” from Sea Brights and Adirondack (both made by Ranger).

I also bought a letter set, but as usual I was disappointed. Searching through a letter set one letter at a time to find the one you want is like hunting and pecking on a typewriter. At least on a typewriter you get the little bell at the end of the line and when you’re done you don’t have to put the letters away.

I’m in love with this thing, which was made in the 1950s and is surprisingly quiet. I haven’t convinced anyone to buy it for me…yet.

Can’t anyone here play this game?

Once upon a time, a recruiter contacted me about a communications job at a financial services company. I was unemployed and happy to have an advocate, but I returned from the interview with some concerns. My chief concern was my co-workers. They were mostly women, which I thought was a good idea, but mostly a year or two out of college, which I thought was not. Why would they hire someone as old as me?

My recruiter, who was my age, was shocked, shocked, that anyone would discriminate against older workers. “We are not going to play their game!” she declared. What game we were going to play, she didn’t say. Baseball? Battleship? If she had said chess, I would’ve been all set.

I didn’t get that job, but the male founder and CEO was eventually accused of inappropriate behavior toward his largely female staff, so I guess it all worked out.

I was reminded of this blip on the radar screen of my career when I thought to apply last week for a fellowship.

If you’re a writer, your money comes from publishers. (If you’re self-published, your money comes from your friends and relatives and your more generous connections on Linkedin.1) But you can apply for free money: grants and fellowships. The United States is chock-full of organizations that want to fund your writing.

Most of this money is not exactly free. Even if you outrun the competition, you might then be required to teach a class or organize a community event. That kind of stuff I understand. What I don’t understand, and what stops me, is when they want you to describe your project and provide an artist’s statement.

I am not going to play their game.

Describe my project? Your grant period doesn’t begin for four months or more. I don’t know what I’ll be into by then. What if I finish what I’m doing and start something new? What if I get excited or bored or end up in a cul de sac? What if I follow Hemingway’s suggestion that I start with something I know and go to something I don’t? Hey man, don’t box me in.

My artist’s statement? Does that have something to do with intersectionality or interiority? Using these words makes me feel like a freakasaurus in a clothing store for teenagers and somebody’s mom just spotted me and called mall security.

I like to write! Writing is fun. Sometimes I write something serious. Sometimes I write about my family, or a job, or sex. One of my goals is to write something that includes all three. This paragraph is as close as I’ll ever get to a statement. And I’m choking on the word “statement.”

Sometimes I think these magazines would benefit from a little more oomph. Like…can’t there ever be a murder? Or a sci-fi story? Or just something fun! Like somebody falling in love! Or somebody having an affair! (Naomi Kanakia on The Yale Review)

I’m happy that these arts groups exist. They help a lot of writers. Acknowledgements pages often mention these benevolent institutions. Perhaps if I had spent a chunk of my adult life in academia, I might feel differently about this process, but I haven’t touched the stuff since Watergate.2

Alicia Jo Rabins said, “If you aren’t rejected from 90 percent of the things you apply to, you aren’t aiming high enough.” Rabins wrote a musical about Bernie Madoff, so she’s probably someone we should listen to. I aim plenty high. I’ll let someone else apply for these things. But if someone out there is handing out free money…I hope they’ll think of me.

My title today was of course uttered by Casey Stengel during the New York Mets’ traumatic first season. If Stengel could’ve traded a couple of infielders for some arts administrators, he would have.

Next week: Where my novel is. That’s a game I do know how to play.

1 You indie authors are too easy to pick on. Did you know that half of all self-published books today have been written (I mean, generated) by an artificial inteligence?

2 Just to say something positive about academia, my journalism instructor, Boston Globe columnist Jeremiah Murphy, taught me how to write an obituary and how to meet a deadline, two skills that have served me well in almost every job I’ve ever had.