There is something liberating about doing a thing you enjoy, even if you know you aren’t doing it well. It feels like skinny-dipping in the town fountain, or giving someone the finger: there’s a defiance, a recklessness to it. If you are a perfectionist, that is.
If you too are a perfectionist, you understand that it goes beyond high personal standards; perfectionism can be crippling. There are loads of things I’ve shied away from because nothing mortifies a perfectionist like a learning curve. We want to be excellent at everything, right from the get-go.
To wit: This was supposed to be The Year I Wrote a Novel. I’d made this promise to myself before; my hard drive is chock-full of false starts. Invariably, somewhere along the way I’d realize what a mess I was making. I knew the middle part, maybe, but not the beginning or the end. “You’re wasting your time,” a little voice inside my head would say. “Stick to short stories! You’ll waste decades of your life writing a stupid novel no one will publish. You’ll be the most embarrassing kind of person in the world: a novelist manqué!”
My inner voice is a jerk.
Now that the hoi polloi have had a chance to read Harper Lee’s “new” book, I don’t feel uncomfortable writing about it before most people have had a chance to make up their own minds. (Spoiler alert: those of you still on the waiting list at your local public library, I’m going to talk about the way Lee supposedly shreds the moral fiber of everyone’s favorite dad, a.k.a. Atticus Finch, like a log of string cheese. You probably already know about this though, unless you’ve just awoken from a coma. In which case: Hi. Welcome back. )
