On Perfection

27 Feb 2012

If you spend enough time going through writing advice, you will eventually come to something about not allowing the need for perfection to prevent you from actually finishing anything. Or “Never let the perfect become the enemy of the good”. Perfection is, after all, something that we strive towards rather than something we achieve. What has me thinking, on the other hand, is the flip side.

Back in July of 2011, I had finally finished The Root of All Things. It wasn’t perfect, in fact I think that it was probably the weakest of the Broken Shores stories, but it was good I had reached the point where I wasn’t sure what needed to be done to improve it. So I posted it and started working on the next story, Trust and Vulnerability (which was about a different character so there was no continuity to worry about), which turned out much better. Then I posted The Forked Path late last week, which continues the story begun in The Root of All Things.

Only after looking at the site stats over the weekend and seeing a bunch of hits on The Root of All Things but none on The Forked Path did I realize my mistake. Of course there’s nothing to be done about it now (perhaps I should have just put in a link for The Forked Path and noted that it was a continuation but could stand alone, who knows). I guess that the take-away from all of this whinging is that when it comes to perfection, like in so many things, the Middle Path is what we should hope to achieve. A prospect more difficult than it sounds, I am sure. Back to writing.