5.12.16 - On What Happens If We're Not Perfect (Perfection Series Part II)

 

I struggle with perfection. I don’t think I’m the only one.
 

I’ve discussed before how my pursuit of perfection paralyzes me. Lately, though, I’ve been wondering why, exactly, I’m holding on so tightly to things. I’ve been self-psychoanalyzing this white-knuckle approach to life, and, as always happens, the universe has been giving me what I need to make sense of my thoughts and find new paths to follow. I’ve had some interesting epiphanies lately.

I’d already decided I wasn’t going to have a birthday, because I refused to get a year older.
 

What I didn’t say aloud was I didn’t want to turn another year older and still feel like I don’t have my shit together.

 

I mean really, I’m an adult. I have a job I love, a husband I adore, a fantastic life with wonderful friends, adorable kittens, and a house that (ten years of renovations later) finally seems to be in pretty good shape.
 

But the edges of my life still feel frayed and unkempt.
 

There are still so many things I want to do, so many ways I want to be more intentional. 

So I revolted at the idea of a birthday, proper. Instead, because I’ve learned to trust my subconscious, I did something utterly unique on my special day. I scheduled some me time. Time I could be alone, and do some thinking. Time to process a bunch of really cool insights I’ve had recently.

Have you seen the movie Burnt, starring Bradley Cooper as a tyrannical bad-boy chef? If you haven’t, I highly recommend it. I love stories about food, and this doesn’t disappoint. But more important is the theme of the story. It is clear, and it is hard. 
 

Perfection kills.

As the protagonist, Adam Jones says, “If it's not perfect, you throw it away…”

A double-Michelin-starred chef, Adam has a fabulous redemptive journey through the story. He is a perfectionist. He holds himself, and everyone around him, to such completely unattainable heights he is constantly disappointed.

There is a moment, late in the movie, when he’s talking with the therapist tasked with keeping him drug-free and in line so he can get his third Michelin star, that is so powerful I had to stop the movie, sit for a few minutes, and try to process what he’d said. He’s being completely sarcastic in tone, but he means every word. This is the heart of his character, his driving force. 
 

Dr. Rosshilde: Tell me what frightens you.

Adam: Spiders. Death.

Dr. Rosshilde: [chuckles] Well, or maybe the imperfection of human relationships, the imperfection of others, of yourself.

Adam: [sighs]

Dr. Rosshilde: What happens if you get this third star?

Adam: Oh no, not “if.” “When.” 

Dr. Rosshilde: Alright, when you get it.

Adam: Celebration. Fireworks. Sainthood. Immortality.

Dr. Rosshilde: Perfection.

Adam: Mmhmm, sure.

Dr. Rosshilde: What happens if you fail?

Adam: Plague. Pestilence. The seas rise, locusts devour. The four horsemen ride, and darkness descends. 

Dr. Rosshilde: Death.

Adam: Sure.
 

I don’t know if this is how everyone feels, but it’s certainly right in line with my feelings on the subject.
 

There’s perfection, or there is the yawning abyss. There is nothing in between.

 

That’s a pretty rough place to live.
 

When I heard it, out loud, and realized this is where I’ve been dangling myself, I knew I needed to make some changes. 

So I decided to listen to Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic podcast. I love Liz’s voice: She has a certain timbre in her tone that resonates with me—it’s sheer joy. She always sounds like she’s on the verge of bursting out into happy, crazy laughter, which in turn makes me happy and primes me to listen.  

I pulled a ton of nuggets from the shows, but the biggest, most mind-blowing one came from the very last installment, during a conversation she’s had with Brené Brown. 
 

Liz said a therapist once told her that what she was terrified of—essentially the worst thing that could ever happen to your art—has already happened.

 

I had to pull the car over. 

I played it back. I felt the same frisson. 

It started me thinking. What’s the very worst thing that can happen to me as an artist?
 

Someone hates my work. My book gets terrible reviews. My book doesn’t sell. I lose my editor. I lose my gig. My story inspires someone to hurt someone else. My creative muse deserts me and I can’t write.

Yeah. Well. You can see how the negativity that lurks disguises itself as a driving need for perfection. If the art is perfect, none of these things will happen. Right?

Right?

Well guess what. Liz is right. All of these horrible things already have happened. Over the past decade, every one of them (except someone hurting someone else, that I know of). 

NO ONE KNOWS is a great example of this.

When I wrote the book, I KNEW there were people who weren’t going to like it. I knew some wouldn’t care for the writing, the change in genre, the story, or (especially) the ending. Whether they missed the twist, or they didn’t buy into the concept, or they simply hated discovering the narrator is truly unreliable, I KNEW I was going to get dinged. It was truly the first thing I’d ever created that I understood and accepted would piss people off. 

I put it out there anyway.

I got a bunch of great trade reviews (PHEW!) and then the the rest started to come in. The good far outweigh the bad, but there are some BAD reviews. (I particularly enjoyed the one who suggested a lobotomy would be necessary to enjoy the book.)

So when I heard Liz say the worst thing that could happen already has… I realized a number of things, including the realization that yes, the worst already has happened to me, in various ways.
 

If I was brave enough to let NO ONE KNOWS out into the world, knowing full well it was going to garner mixed reviews, what in the HELL am I holding back on anymore?

 

I have been using the goal of perfection to limit myself. Nay, to punish myself. All the while not even realizing that the worst has already happened, and I’ve lived through it virtually unscathed.  

Yes, there’s been a lot of negative self-talk in my brain lately. It’s not because NO ONE KNOWS got some bad reviews—surprisingly, that’s not a big deal to me. People are entitled to their opinions, and not everybody likes everything. It’s something deeper. 

The nasty four letter world we all hate.
 

Fear.

 

Resistance is fear. Trying to attain perfection is fear. 

So yes, the worst thing that could happen to my art already has—there are people who don’t like it and won’t ever buy another book. 

And… the sun is still rising in the mornings. I am still creating. And by God, I am going to trust my gut from here on out, and stop letting this relentless pursuit of perfection get in my way.

Next blog, I’m going to look at some ways I’m reframing all this talk into something productive. Because I’m tired of trying to be perfect. I need to trust myself, trust my art, and trust the process. If I write the words, I will create a book. All the rest is out of my control.
 

What do you think is the worst thing that can happen to your art?

5.10.16 - The Struggle Is Real

5.8.16 - Sunday Smatterings

Happy Sunday, chickens!

Happy Mother's Day! I'm sadly in another state so I don't get to see my mommy today. Give yours an extra squeeze for me. 

I'm gearing up to go on the road, and this time my travels take me to BEA (Book Expo America), one of the biggest book events of the year. Are you around the Chicago area? You should stop by! Click here to find me this week.

And now, without further adieu...

Here's what happened around the Internets this week:

I always love it when my bestie blogs. This week, author Laura Benedict wrote about coming to terms with a life going continually down the rabbit hole, something all writers do. So much brilliance and honesty in one post.

I probably relate to this a little too much: 15 Slightly Odd Things All Book Lovers Have Done.

So apparently New Jersey makes wine, and it's delicious.

YA author John Green talked about his book LOOKING FOR ALASKA, the most challenged book of 2015. I loved his response to censorship: it's respectful, articulate food-for-thought.

This is how to craft a better To-Do List (I love this so much!).

No matter how you feel about her, Amy Schumer makes a good point here: Amy Schumer’s ‘I’m Sorry’ Sketch Skewers A Culture That Makes Women Apologize Constantly.

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And closer to home:

On The Wine Vixen, Amy found a delightful under-$20 zinfandel that pairs delightfully with pan-seared red snapper and mango-avocado salsa. And she included those recipes, too, because she's nice like that.

I started a new series on the Tao this week on perfectionism and creativity: two things that go hand in hand, but aren't necessarily good companions.

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That's it from me! Hope you're having a lovely Mother's Day, American chickens, and enjoy the busy but beautiful May season. We'll talk again soon!

Xoxo,
J.T.

5.5.16 - On The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection

From the time I was able to hold a pencil and write, perfection was my friend, and mistake my enemy.  

It was a paralyzing combination.  

I wanted to be an artist, but when faced with a blank sheet of paper, I was terrified. Not with fear that I couldn’t draw, couldn’t create. I knew I could. No, my fear was I would ruin the pristine paper with a line out of place, and I’d have to throw it away.

I would have ruined the paper with a mistake.
 

When I realized writing was a simpler thing for me than drawing, I had the same issue. If I misspelled a word, or miswrote a word, that was it. The paper was ruined, and I had to start over.

Nothing but perfection was (*ahem* is) acceptable. 

This holds true for most everything I do, all these years later.  Now I understand that this urge for perfection is a manifestation of OCD, and I find ways to push past the early paralyzing moments when faced with blank pages. For new novels, I have a formula for starting. This includes building a book journal, building a file, naming the book, putting together epigraphs… little things that mean the pages aren’t entirely blank.

But that’s easy to do when you’re in a computer screen. When you’re doing it by hand, it’s a whole different story.

All these years later, I’m still always terrified that I’m going to make a mistake on that first page and have to rip it out and start over. Trust me, there are a number of notebooks in my house with a first page missing.

I’ve been examining these urges lately, because I came across something interesting. It’s a story about how dependent we’ve become on the Cloud, and how we’re losing a lot of our history because everything is typed on computers.

Thinking about this, I had a realization. This is directly related to how we’re so carefully curating our lives for one another. If you think about it, we are always striving for perfection in our written work, so much so that we’ve become dependent on spellcheck and grammar checks, and nothing that makes it to public consumption hasn’t been edited to death.

What are we losing by working electronically? What bits of genius, or specialness, are we losing when we can so easily delete and write something fresh? 
 

Not only are we curating our lives for one another, we’re curating our thoughts… for ourselves.

Whether your desire to have a clean, perfect document is pathological or simply a result of the way you want to present yourself to the world, we are eliminating some of our finest work when we edit ourselves online, on the computer screen, in our writing programs.

Think of what we’re losing? That original thought, that original impetus, the original words, edited into coherent [[thoughts]]… *

*I JUST did it. I saw the words “thoughts”, and even though it’s correct, I immediately backward deleted to come up with something else, something unique that isn’t a repetitive word. It’s instinct; I do it without thinking. Which makes me wonder: How much do I delete throughout a day? I don’t keep track of how many words I type in a day, I keep track of the end product. At the end of the day, I have X number of words.

What if I didn’t delete and rewrite? What if I was forced to write by hand, in a notebook, and had a record of all those words I decided weren’t right, weren’t correct, were misspelled?

I’ve always wanted to write a book by hand. I do a lot of handwritten work already, from journals to note taking to planning and processing ideas. Could I stand to write a whole story by hand? Could I stand the XXed out words, the arrows drawn to realign paragraphs, the hundreds of mistakes I make in a day of writing? Moreover, how many words am I REALLY writing in a day? I’d bet I write two to three times as much as is recorded at the end of the day, trying out sentences, trying ideas, words, themes. I immediately delete when something isn’t working.

What if I stopped doing that?
 

We’re talking a monstrous sea change for me. For us all. Paper isn’t the precious commodity it used to be. Ink and pens are easy to work with. I don’t know that I could give up my laptop—the ideas seem to go through my brain directly into my fingers onto the page, without stops or bypasses, and I don’t feel that flow when I’m writing by hand.

But it’s doable. It’s totally doable.

And I would have a record—a real record, a true record—of the words. It wouldn’t be perfect, and all that markup would probably give me hives, but it’s something worth thinking about. At the very least, I’m going to try and be more intentional about how I self-edit.

In the next few weeks, look for a few more posts with the theme of perfection stifling our art. It’s something I really want to explore.
 

So….

What say you? Are we losing our culture to autocorrect and spell check and the keyboard?  Do you write by hand or by keyboard?

5.1.16 - Sunday Smatterings

Happy Sunday, lovelies!

Did you have a good week? Yesterday was my birthday—thank you for all the love, by the way!—so I'm still riding high on birthday weekend bliss and brand-new hardwood floors (which came after a leak in the kitchen, so... not planned, but certainly not unwelcome, either). Here's what they look like! I'm over the moon. I think they count as a birthday present, right?

Anywho...

Here's what happened on the Internets this week:
 

Check out some of the oldest libraries in the world. So cool!

You know I love a good productivity hack, something that helps you figure out how to do something you do every day even better. This list doesn't disappoint (alert: it's long—a podcast transcript, no less—but it's worth a read!). Especially important are ways to find deep work time, time without interruption that allows you to really focus on your work, and how to delegate. Writers are infamous for trying to do too much with too little time. This is a great guide for how to get the most out of your creative work life. 
 

The man who taught me all about crime, David Achord, retired homicide detective, and the reason Taylor and her team come to life on the page, has a new book out, plus it's free on Kindle Unlimited.
 

Colts QB Andrew Luck has started a book club—and he has good taste. Wouldn't it be cool if all our heroes started staring what they read?
 

Who wants to go visit this new museum with me?

And closer to home:

So I got to meet Margaret Atwood (swoon!). She's just as whimsical and wise as you think she'd be. Check out our chat about her newest book, THE HEART GOES LAST (and when you figure out what that title means, I guarantee you'll shudder...). 
 

Don't forget: I'll be doing a Twitter chat with book club extraordinaire She Reads this Thursday, May 5 (Cinco de Mayo!) at 7 pm CST. Use the hashtag #srbkchat to follow the fun.
 

Over at The Wine Vixen, Amy talked about a lovely light red that's perfect for your spring dishes.
 

Also, I had to share this with you because it's so cool: Deep South Magazine put together a Nashville travel guide based on landmarks in NO ONE KNOWS!! It is comprehensive and does a lovely job showing off our fine city. Thanks, DSM!
 

Oh: and the WHEN SHADOWS FALL ebook is on sale for only $0.99! Get yours now—this sale expires in a couple of days.

Alright, folks, that's it from me! Y'all stay out of trouble, and we'll talk again soon!

Xoxo,
J.T.