Found Voices™ Podcast #3: Perfection & Your Creative Process

Oh boy,

Do I dig this music.

Welcome to Found Voices.

I'm Carolyn Ziel.

Episode 3,

Perfection and the Creative Process.

When I teach a student a new tool,

A new concept,

A new technique in writing,

And send them on their way to do their assignment,

And usually they'll come back the next week and say something like,

Wow,

That was so hard.

I didn't do that right.

And before they read,

They'll say something like,

Here goes nothing.

And what I've realized is,

Underneath all that complaining and worry,

There's an expectation of getting it right the first time they're doing it.

There's an expectation of being perfect.

And I wonder about this expectation.

Why is it,

With writing,

There is this notion that you're supposed to get it right the first time you do it?

That you're supposed to sit down,

Never having written before,

Write a book?

As if it's the easiest thing to do.

As if you don't need to practice.

As if it doesn't take trial and error.

As if it doesn't take draft after draft after draft.

So they come to class,

And they're beating themselves up because they didn't catch on right away.

Because maybe it was a little challenging.

Because they weren't perfect.

They didn't do the exercise 100% perfectly well the first time they tried it.

The definition,

According to Merriam-Webster,

Of perfection is freedom from fault or defect.

Flawlessness.

Flawlessness.

That's a tough one to live up to.

The quality or state of being saintly.

Saintly?

You have to be a saint?

You're trying to be saintly?

That's tough.

And unsurpassable degree of accuracy or excellence.

Unsurpassable.

No one will be able to be better than you.

That's a lot to live up to.

Hemingway,

Faulkner,

Fitzgerald.

Joan Didion.

And even though you're not really trying to be Joan Didion,

Because no one's Joan Didion,

You're still putting a lot of pressure on your creative process.

You're trying to perform.

You're not creating.

And you're putting a ton of pressure on yourself.

And sure,

Striving for excellence is a good thing.

But if you put the word supreme in front of it,

As in an exemplification of supreme excellence,

Another definition,

That's a lot of pressure as well.

And you're only setting yourself up for failure.

Not the right kind of failure.

And I'll explain that in a minute.

Because with this idea of perfection,

You are now comparing yourself to your community,

To other artists and writers who have come before you and who will come after you.

And you're striving for something beyond excellence.

At least beyond the excellence I'm referring to.

So let me explain.

When I think of a writer striving for excellence,

That includes making mistakes and learning from them.

When you're trying to be perfect,

You're trying not to make a mistake.

You're in fact afraid of making a mistake.

And this tightens you up.

It's hard to create from this tight,

Tight,

Fear-based place.

So you have to be willing and open to making mistakes.

You also have to be willing to take risks.

A willingness to risk it all.

An openness to actual failure.

In fact,

Why not try to fail?

Why not try to make mistakes?

I know that sounds funny,

But think about it.

If you're open to not being perfect,

To making a mistake,

To taking risks,

You now have space,

A lot of freedom and a lot of space to create,

To write.

So sure,

You want to be the best you can be and you're striving to be better.

And you're learning and you're taking your classes and you're reading your books and you're practicing your craft,

But you're not doing it to be better than everybody else.

You're doing it to be better than where you are now.

You're doing it to learn,

To grow,

To cultivate your voice,

And you improve over time.

When you try to be better than everyone else around you,

You're shifting from the heart of the creative process.

You're shifting from your heart to your ego.

There is a quote on my website I want to share.

The moment you stop trying to say something is the moment you'll have something to say.

Trying is your ego.

Letting go is your heart.

And this quote came out of me trying to be perfect,

Trying to do it right,

Because I've been there.

I know what it's like to stand up in front of fellow writing students and my teacher and read my work out loud and feel that fear of,

Gosh,

I didn't do this well.

No one's going to like it.

I'm not the best.

In fact,

I'm the worst.

I made mistake after mistake.

I don't understand the assignment.

I felt stupid,

Afraid,

All of it.

I get it.

I remember this one time where this idea of working from my ego hit me and I shifted.

I was trying to write something a certain way.

I wanted it to come out a certain way.

And I was writing and writing and I don't know,

I spent hours.

I was so frustrated.

It was like in a movie,

You know,

I was ripping pages out of my journal and crossing them off and crumpling them up.

And finally,

I kind of gave up really in that moment.

I just kind of said,

I got to step away.

So I think my husband and I went sailing that day.

And I didn't come back to the project,

To what I was writing for the rest of the day.

The next day when I sat to write again,

Something had shifted in me.

I had stopped trying to write this particular thing.

I just sat down at my journal and began to write and boom,

I wound up saying what I wanted to say,

But it was more clear,

More precise.

It came out really,

Really easily.

And it was so much more creative and original than how I had been writing it before.

What a surprise.

I had stopped trying to be perfect.

When you're trying to be perfect,

You're in your head and it's your ego that's driving your creative process.

It's like trying to be a gymnast and do a beautiful floor mat routine,

But you're doing it in a cage,

A very,

Very small cage.

You can't move.

You don't have the freedom to explore the space around you.

Once you let go,

Let go of trying to be the best,

Supreme,

Perfect.

Well then you're in your heart and you are also in the messiness of your creative process.

And that's okay because that messiness is special and personal and unique to you.

And we want to dive into that messiness.

We want to embrace it.

It's an amazing thing.

Once we let go of the idea of perfection,

We can embrace the beautiful mess that is our creative process.

That is creativity.

In Anne Lamott's book,

Bird by Bird,

Some Instructions on Writing and Life,

She describes perfectionism as quote,

The voice of the oppressor,

The enemy of the people.

She writes that perfectionism will ruin your writing,

Blocking inventiveness and playfulness and life force.

And she's correct.

When you're trying to be perfect and you're focusing on trying to be a good writer,

You will miss out on your voice,

On your originality and your genius.

You're too tight,

Too rigid.

You won't experiment and there is no freedom in perfection.

We all want to be good writers.

I want to be a good writer.

And if you want to be a good writer,

Then you have to be willing to be a bad writer.

You have to be willing to be a bad writer.

Let me say that one more time.

If you want to be a good writer,

You have to be willing to be a bad writer.

You have to be willing to make mistakes and take risks because it's in those mistakes and those risks and the willingness to be a bad writer that you will find your ability to be a good writer.

It's in the mistakes and the fixing of these mistakes that you wind up writing something you would have never written and you'll surprise yourself and you just might find some of your best work.

I've said this quote before and I'll say it again.

Robert Frost wrote,

No surprise for the writer,

No surprise for the reader.

There's magic in the surprise.

I can't tell you how many times I've written something and come back to it over and over.

And it's in those pieces where we're putting that kind of effort and attention and not from a place of tightness or fear,

But just from a place of learning and openness that these are the pieces that become your best work.

The drafts,

One,

Two,

Five,

Seven,

Ten,

More.

Who cares how many drafts?

What is the rush?

If you're not getting paid and you don't have a deadline,

What's the rush?

My writing teacher says,

Never beat yourself up for writing something crap.

I love that.

Never beat yourself up for writing something crap.

Because we all write crap.

We all have days when we're on a roll and we all have days when we're not.

You want to embrace this creative,

Messy process.

Embrace the mess,

The difficulty.

The difficulty is an experience.

And guess what?

You can incorporate this experience,

This not knowing what to write,

This messiness into your writing.

One day my teacher said something like that in class.

And I wrote this little note,

Incorporate my experience into my characters.

And we all do that when we're writing characters.

But I took it to another level.

And what I did was,

Because I didn't know what was going on next and where to go and what was happening,

I didn't know what to write because that happens often.

I wrote from my character's perspective.

And she wrote or said,

I don't know what's next.

I don't know where I'm going.

And it kind of went on from there.

And it was the character's experience reflecting my own,

My own writing experience,

My own creative process.

So one day you're writing and you're stuck and it's hard and you're having a hard time.

But what if instead of sort of wallowing or complaining or being annoyed or frustrated,

You turn that difficulty into the words of your character,

Into the words of a poem,

Not a rant or a complaint,

But you incorporate that particular messy,

Creative frustration into your writing.

It's kind of magical.

And if you write and you don't like what you write,

Guess what?

You step aside and you come back to it.

Or you write something else and you come back to it then after that.

Or maybe you never come back to it.

The other thing that my writing teacher says a lot is,

In order to be great,

You have to be bad a lot.

If you want to be good,

You have to be willing to be bad.

Because if you're willing to be bad,

You're willing to take a risk.

And if you allow me to be corny,

It's in this risk that you will reap the reward.

And in this case,

The reward is your genius.

When you're trying to be perfect and you're afraid to make a mistake,

You're just going to do what you always do over and over.

You might never improve and you might never tap into your genius.

You'll rely on your talent.

Gosh,

I'm reading a book now.

I'm not going to say what it is.

And she's a decent writer.

But boy,

Is she a boring writer.

She's talented,

But she's not tapping into her genius.

And there's a difference.

Ralph Ellison,

The invisible man,

He tapped into his genius.

If you read the last couple of pages of his book,

Maybe you can find it online.

However,

I invite you to read that book.

It's phenomenal.

You will see what I mean.

Because this writing isn't just your standard everyday writing.

It's filled with surrealism and imagery and dense,

Gorgeous,

Intense language.

It's writing that is filled with risk.

You just don't sit down and write like that on a first draft.

So remember,

The magic is in the mistakes,

Is in the risk.

You bypass your talent.

You tap into your genius.

This book I'm reading now,

Not as much.

So it's one thing to be good and relying on your goodness,

Your talent.

But it's another thing to try new things,

To step out into scary territory,

To give yourself permission to not only be bad,

But to experiment,

To try new things.

And it's in this that you will expand in your creative process.

It is in this risk,

Risking it all,

The willingness to be bad,

That you will be great.

You will eventually tap into your genius and become a great writer.

You won't be the best because there's always going to be someone better.

But that's trying to be perfect.

And there is no reason you need to be a perfect writer.

Honestly,

I don't think there's such a thing.

Margaret Atwood wrote,

If I waited for perfection,

I'd never write There's no magic in perfection.

There's only tightness.

So I invite you to embrace your imperfection.

And when you strive for excellence,

Remember to include failure and mistake and risk in your definition of excellence.

And don't forget to embrace your creative process,

Your own unique brand of messy creativity.

So cheers to you for embracing your imperfections,

For risking it all,

To becoming a better writer.

Thanks for listening to episode 3 of Found Voices.

Play great on!