You don’t have to be perfect. That’s my job.
On the serious side: No, your novel, your short story, dear Lord, your paragraph is not going to be perfect.
It’s particularly not going to be perfect according to whatever image you have in your head.
This is particularly true for novels. And particularly true when we’re “Young” in craft (Writing is a d*mn fountain of youth, as far as I can tell. I often find myself becoming young again, when the novel really matters to me, or something.)
Because novels are large enough that you can have the illusion you’re going to fit that entire world in your head in it.
You’re not. It doesn’t work that way. A novel doesn’t have a world in it. If we’re good enough and work hard enough we learn to fit enough of it in that the reader fills in the rest.
When I first discovered that I wasn’t completely awful I took a second place in the Pikes Peak Writer’s contest. This kind of woke me up and made me realize that perhaps I could do this. So, despite having a toddler and being more broke than…. well… I don’t think I can think of an appropriate comparison. Let’s just say at a time when the only way to submit novels was to print the whole manuscript then mail them out repeatedly, I couldn’t even mail it out once. It was $8 and in 1992 we didn’t have the room in our budget to do that every three months or so.
However, I knew that would improve, so I started writing seriously. And within ten years I’d sold sixty or so short stories, and three novels. None of which was the novel that played second. That one is waiting to be re-written “now I know how.” but that’s something else.
Meanwhile the woman who won first place had…. rewritten the winning novel. For ten years. She has since got off that flat spot and has a career in mystery, but yeah, she really did that.
Because the novel had to be perfect. Which of course it never would be.
Worse, in my case — I don’t know about hers — I make the paragraph/story/novel worse after about the third pass.
So, write the damn thing. Don’t revise while writing. After you’re done, do two passes one for plot, and one for spelling. Then leave it alone.
It doesn’t get better if you keep picking at it.
And weirdly, when you publish it? The readers very often see the things you didn’t have the room to put in. Sometimes even, weirdly, the right ones.
It’s like a sort of magic.
Stop trying to build the entire world from paper and ink. Make magic instead.
Mad Genius Club 
24 responses to “You Don’t Have To Be Perfect – Sarah A. Hoyt”
“Never rewrite, except to editorial order” – Heinlein might have been exaggerating slightly, but he was basically right about this part.
I’m going to have to fight this one in the next Elect story. If it is a romance, well, there’s a huge structure problem. If it is a rural Urban Fantasy that has romantic elements, I just need to add more foreshadowing. But I need to pick a genre—not tomorrow, but by mid-September.
Having straddled that particular line myself, you have my sympathy.
So, what defines where a story falls on that sort of line?
The beats. The story lacks a 1) meet-cute or initial meeting with 2) mutual attraction then 3) repulsion and 4) the slow-burn before getting back together. The first two steps happen 3/4 of the way through the story at the moment, and there’s no steps three and four. I’d have to change the plot structure to get the characters together far earlier so that steps one-three happen, and that means re-doing the bulk of the story.
The first story in the series is a romance, although that’s not how I marketed it. Do I stick with that genre-pattern, or change? I’ll have to decide at some point.
For stage 3, is it really anything that drives them to be apart, or does it specifically need to be a conflict between them?
For a true genre romance, it has to be something about the two protagonists.
The perfect is the enemy of the good. (paraphrased and stolen from Voltaire) Thankfully, I *can’t* endlessly rewrite sections to improve them, so I’m pushed into writing more after editing, which makes me edit sections, then write more, etc… It leaves the first half of a story fairly well smoothed out, but I have to push myself into polishing that end chapter or two. Next step, actually publishing for money. (or loose change)
I am in this essay and I don’t like it. I literally was just working through some of this on paper/in my head yesterday. And here you are calling me out on it before I have a chance to put it into practice. Like you are nailing the last nail into the excuse coffin. Great reminder/confirmation. And it applies to art, too. That picture/Cover/etc is never going to be perfect.
I think it’s catching. I see me in there, too.
But practice makes permanent (not perfect, only perfect practice makes perfect), so back to the word mines today. Totally changed a chapter recently, because the MC needs a talkin’ to. He’s getting squirrely again, trying to lift the whole mass of troubles onto his shoulders.
Nobody around here ever does that, right? Surely not. We’re all paragons of common sense and responsibility.
That is NOT my hand you see raised to your inquiry. It is not.
I think your brain might be entangled with mine in some higher dimension, Sarah.
I’m just contemplating going back and ripping out half a chapter. The Character has her arms crossed and she’s shaking her head at me. She would never lose she schlitz like that, she says.
I might be wasting time because I don’t want the book to end. Annoying.
I think there’s an exception for “the character has informed me that that was the idiot ball and I’m not holding it.”
Also happens when a character says, “Wait, why am I doing this again? There’s a convenient off ramp right over there I can take.”
Author, “Because you care about her?”
Character: “She’s cute and all, but she did lie to me, and then vanished. Why exactly should I, ‘checks notes,’ says here, ‘invade the netherworld?’”
Author “Uhmm…” writes backstory furiously, “because you know enough about each other that she wouldn’t just vanish?”
Character extends mental middle finger. “Fine. I guess now I have to ask one of the locals to tell me how to got hell…”
Actually thought it was going to require a more extensive rewrite than it did, but it turned out to be less than half a page.
This is more like Character looking at me tolerantly and saying “Could I be the paragon you’ve written up to now and then flip out over such a pinprick? Come on.”
On the other hand the problem you’ve set here is a great one. How many idiot novels have we seen where guy meets girl and then five minutes later he’s braving the Gates of Hell to get her back? (Or lately they gender-bend all that, but still exactly the same bogus plot with Woke stickers plastered on it.)
If I’m rushing those gates there better be a Reason that can hold water and a Method to get it done.
And none of this “small unit slipping past the guards” BS. Please, haven’t we seen enough of that? How about Big Freakin’ Unit vaporizes the guards and then f-s over the whole devil’s brigade? I could stand to see some more of that.
I had a scene once where the mooks ran away, because they’re not getting paid to fight behemoths.
The behemoth in question was a rather reasonable sort and let them get away, too. Not as satisfying smushing the small fry. So much more fun when you can rip a full bloody balrog in half. And frustrate the bad guy bosses, because their balrog wasn’t supposed to fail.
Just because you’re on the side of the angels doesn’t mean you have to always fight clean. Thankfully.
In all fairness to those two, things had sort of escalated way beyond what either of them were thinking at the start.
That one was a pure pantsing story, which wasn’t may any less complex by her tendency to never actually explain anything. So he is also wandering around with a woefully incomplete picture of what’s going on, and very well aware of the fact.
If I ever go back to the Donald McGillivray story (yes, based on the song), the male protagonist comes back with friends. With guns. And an armored vehicle. Because he’s Army, and not stupid.
One advantage of writing (and finishing) a lot of books is that eventually you learn that the novel you put on paper is never going to be as wonderful as the novel in your head.
I added (and finishing) because I’ve known a number of wannabe writers, some of them quite talented, who sabotaged themselves by dropping the WIP for a new project just about the time they discover that the WIP isn’t perfect.
Then again, there are degrees of imperfection, and some of my books have pushed the limit to new lows.
Most of mine are only tangentially related to the story in my head. But that means I get to find a *new* story, so it’s all good. Mostly.
Generally it’s ill-formed and incohesive notions in my head and improves vastly on getting onto the page.
I see myself in this post and my issue is the whole “visual” versus “descriptive” thing going on with my writing.
Right now, I’m writing “A Solist In Rome” and I’m avoiding doing description porn as much as I can. The way I see it, I can always add it later-get the story done and running.
I figure I’m about twelve chapters in, so call it about a fifth to a quarter done with this story.
Also, Untitled Space Isekei Novel is coming along a little quicker, because I’m avoiding some description porn. I can’t help it in some sections (I’m trying to write how a software program would interact with humans. It makes sense, I promise…), but it’s moving a bit faster.
(There’s probably going to be an infodump appendix at this rate. But it’s relevant.)
…I wish I was an artist. But, I suspect I would need someone behind me with a club to get panels out of my hand…
I wish to testify that the ‘paragraph’ part of the statement is true, oh yes, it is.
In just under three years, I have managed to write, under a daily deadline, 294 300-words-or-less ‘Tiny Devotionals,’ and sometimes…well, sometimes, it shoots back. Frequently, I’ve had to rip out something I’m really interested in saying, but didn’t have the room. More often, I’ve had to JUST PUBLISH IT, and hope that the goofy prose managed to get the idea across.
The discipline has been really, really, really good for me; but sometimes, I find myself wandering around the neighborhood, mispronouncing words. SO far, my favorite was when I was thinking of Ypres, and I yelled “YEEP!” as I was walking up Chattooga Drive.
YMMV.
I needed to hear this right now. Thank you, Sarah!
Now, if I could just think of the perfect first line to kick this ss in gear…