Perfect? Oh my freakin god...nothing I have ever written is nor will it ever be perfect. Never.
This post horrified me to the point of flailing a bit about how to comment on it. Like your husband, I have to wonder if this agent has ever had contact with actual working writers.
Some of the comments left on her blog horrified me even more. Rewriting the same book 25 times? There is no way you can be detached or objective if you've written the same novel 25 times. The best advice I ever got from writers ahead of me in this game is that you have to learn to let go and send it out. You have to write the next book and not obsess, and that no book is ever perfect.
A person fledgling writers see as being in a position of authority, such as an agent, telling them that nothing less than perfect will do disturbs me. Perfect is a trap. Perfect is a goal you can never reach.
There is such a difference--a gap, a chasm, a scale and a range-- between shrugging and saying 'eh, good enough, I don't feel like working on this any longer' and throwing an unpolished piece of writing out into the world, and 'ohmigod, I can't look at this anymore or I'm going to puke, I'm at the point of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, and if I rewrite one more sentence I'm going to ruin this novel and be forced to fling myself in front of a bus! This is the best I can do right now and it will just have to be good enough.'
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2009-07-21 12:38 am (UTC)This post horrified me to the point of flailing a bit about how to comment on it. Like your husband, I have to wonder if this agent has ever had contact with actual working writers.
Some of the comments left on her blog horrified me even more. Rewriting the same book 25 times? There is no way you can be detached or objective if you've written the same novel 25 times. The best advice I ever got from writers ahead of me in this game is that you have to learn to let go and send it out. You have to write the next book and not obsess, and that no book is ever perfect.
A person fledgling writers see as being in a position of authority, such as an agent, telling them that nothing less than perfect will do disturbs me. Perfect is a trap. Perfect is a goal you can never reach.
There is such a difference--a gap, a chasm, a scale and a range-- between shrugging and saying 'eh, good enough, I don't feel like working on this any longer' and throwing an unpolished piece of writing out into the world, and 'ohmigod, I can't look at this anymore or I'm going to puke, I'm at the point of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, and if I rewrite one more sentence I'm going to ruin this novel and be forced to fling myself in front of a bus! This is the best I can do right now and it will just have to be good enough.'