Death to Perfection

Last night, I killed it. Asphyxiated, strangled, mutilated, and pummeled it to death.  Annihilated.  Amazing, that bright and early, the very same morning of last night’s crime, before it died, I had been certain it was my ticket to fame.

It was my perfect chapter, the climax, the focal point, the suspense…the reason a reader would stick it out, reading all the way to the end, every chapter before the perfect chapter where it would all come together and the reader would know she had just finished a book written by a genius of a magnitude too great to be described.

But such an important chapter could use just a little refinement.  Just a tweaking.  A preening, a cleaning, a once-more-over before I sent if off to dazzle some editor.  I printed the perfect chapter, and took it to our group’s Tuesday morning editing meeting.  Just for a little review.  Maybe take out a word or phrase, here or there, change an ellipse to a dash, a period to a semicolon.  And it would be perfection perfected.

I passed the copies around the table.  We read each others work in silence, seven pens scratching on 20 lb. paper.  Seven writers editing, quiet and thorough.  I brought home my edited chapter and laid it aside for later.  No hurry.  I could tackle this little bit of work later tonight.

The afternoon passed. Vic and I went out to test drive a car one more time.  We had dinner out, wine and spinach-artichoke dip, and good conversation about all the things that had made the day so perfect for each of us.  As we talked, I thought about my perfect chapter back at home.  Vic paid for dinner, and I felt plump and satisfied, ready to finish the day at the computer.

At home in the office, I flipped through the edited pages, taking quick stock of the work I faced.  Out of eight pages, several passed inspection without a single change.  Of course.  They were perfect.  A few red suggestions from Andrea, and more black suggestions from Sharon, perfect suggestions, mostly.  I set about to plug them in, moving the cursor about here and there, and voila!—I had it finished!!

Now, I could have turned off the computer and gone to bed.

But when you are staring at eight pages of perfection that you have authored all by your little self, who can blame you for wanting to read it through just one more time?  I looked at the clock.  Nine twenty.  Only ten minutes before bedtime.  Perfect.  I could read a bit of perfection and then go to bed happy, satisfied…fulfilled.

Moving the computer to page one, I began.  And like hitting a brick wall I hadn’t seen before, I asked myself, “Why didn’t someone catch that in the editing process?”  It wouldn’t be hard to fix.  I grabbed three words from the end of the sentence and moved them to the front.  No.  Better to delete them all together.  And ten minutes later, cutting out the first paragraph all together, I had rewritten the intro into two succinct sentences.

Bit by bit, I moved through the perfect chapter, pinching, plugging, stretching, deleting and bypassing problems that seemed to pop through the glass screen like computer blackheads.  I looked at the clock.  Eleven o’clock, and after all my serious efforts to fix the perfect chapter, I hated it.  I wanted it to die.

If this is what professional writing is about, then who needs it?  I filed the stupid story back into its databyte file and banged the <enter> key extra hard just to see if I could make the computer lose the file by accident.

Now, the morning after the night before, knowing my poor battered chapter is waiting to be revived, I just stare at the screen and dare it to try to bring back the loathsome eight pages.  If they know what’s good for them, they’ll stay just where they are!!

 

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