Not Doing it Right

I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to do things right the first time. From a young age, I wanted people to see how capable I was at completing any task at hand. That way, they wouldn’t worry about me “getting it” and if others didn’t worry, maybe I wouldn’t have to either.

Some examples:

• I was terrified the morning we were supposed to learn how to write the letter ‘e’ in kindergarten. It seemed like such a hard letter to write and what if I just never figured it out?
• I spent a long time laying in bed in first grade making up practice scenarios for when the speech therapist came. I murmured word after word to myself perfectly until I got tripped up by “world.” “Whor-uld. Woor-uld.” I couldn’t nail it. So, I planned some dialogue so that we could both laugh it off together and she would know that I was too reasonable to need extra speech therapy.
• Two years ago, I wrote and tossed aside an entire 60,000 word novel draft because it was nowhere close to perfect.

Since those thens, I’ve learned that trying to be perfect doesn’t guarantee perfection. Nothing I’ve ever done or made could or should be considered perfect. Because I’m not sure perfect is a real concept as it relates to art. You can objectively get a perfect score on a multiple choice test. There’s a set answer key for those.

With art, whether it’s a drawing or a story, or anything in that realm, the effect it has on the audience varies greatly by the individual and their circumstances. There’s no way to guarantee someone will feel the piece the way it was initially intended because every single person is different. Because of the myriad of factors beyond our control, it seems to me that trying to make something others will label “perfect” or even “correct” sets the bar impossibly high. Instead, you can create things that you’d like to see/hear/read/enjoy and leave in the world for others to react however they react to them. And maybe doing that is fine, if not correct or perfect.

I haven’t found any way to conclusively determine perfection for others or myself. But I’ve found small ways to communicate how I interpret the world around me to others. I like to draw certain kinds of pictures — expressive faces, landscapes with colorful skies, etc. I like to write fairy tales and stories about teenagers figuring out who they are. I’ve found that the more work I put into something, the better I like the result — usually. Do I still catch myself trying to make “perfect” art? Yes. Definitely. Do I stress about it? Not as much as I used to.

When I first moved to Chicago, I jumped into a comedy writing class feeling extremely confident. I’d read all the books about comedy writing I could get my hands on. I was sure my sketches would stand out among my peers’.

But they didn’t. They landed blandly in the middle of the pack every time. They were written more to be structurally correct than to be funny, but I couldn’t have told you that then. The best sketches in the room were those guided by the writer’s real voice and the things they personally found funny. Mine had a lot of elements I assumed others would laugh at, even if I didn’t really. I was surprised when they were met with silence. In fact, I was so discouraged by the lack of response most of my work got that I gave up any sort of official writing for about three years.

A note to those taking comedy writing classes: they not rivers of abundant, flowing laughter. It may help to expect zero laughs at your work so that if you get any, it feels like a reward not a relief. It’s hard to truly enjoy someone else’s writing when you’re simultaneously hoping they’ll enjoy yours, or seething that your sketch was met with icy silence moments before they started reading theirs. In short, writing classes are not an easy environment to feel successful in, though, chances are you will gain a lot of skill and strength in ways you didn’t expect.

When I came back from my mournful non-writing days, I realized that a lot of my hesitation came from the hope that my work would pour out of me, completely and immaculately conveying the idea in my head. This never happens. For instance, I turned that novel from before into a screenplay. I’ve written four drafts of it and hundreds more pages of backstory and dialogue and while it’s closer to the version that’s in my head, it’s not perfect. At all. Imagination might be the only perfection out there and it’s nearly impossible to properly capture it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying for.

Most of the writing I do nowadays is backstory. If I have an idea for a screenplay, I can form it together through endless pages of made up dates, towns, relationships, and families. Knowing that no one will read these pages of free-written ideas and plots is very comforting. Because I expect nothing from it but a better understanding of my own thoughts, I feel successful every time I do it. It’s safe from all opinions but my own. It helps me shape the story I’ll later put out to be read or judged or ignored by an audience. And I know that whether someone calls it perfect or not doesn’t matter, because I made something for me that I liked enough to share with you.