Thomas Behnke

Professor Bryant

ENW 311

22 March 2021

My playwriting professor and director of my play, “Volts and Ohms said something that I think is very important for all writers. She said, “Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good.” She said she couldn’t remember who originated that phrase (it was Voltaire), but she was using it to encourage us to push through the tough times in writing when perhaps we know what is coming out isn’t our best work. It reminded me of something I read in Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, a book I have revisited many times over the years. On pg. 93, when she is discussing how to know when a piece is finished, she says, “perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.” I am glad that I have (mostly) eliminated the more problematic aspects of perfectionism in my writing endeavors. However, it certainly is present. I have a writing partner who has just begun his journey into writing (poor guy. Go back! Lol), and he calls me up daily with changes to his plot or characters. The problem he has is that he doesn’t actually write anything but outlines. I am not an outliner, so this is a bit alien to me, but what I tell him to try to get him over the hump is that it is easier to change abstract thoughts in your head than it is to change things you have actually written.  This relates to the perfectionism quotes, I think because what my friend wants to do, and I think we all do to a lesser or greater extent, is to write a perfect first draft. He hasn’t gotten the fact that no one writes like that. No one. Your drafts, even the ones that seem to come straight from the muse and you think are good, are still drafts. They will change, they will evolve. You will find things wrong with them and try to fix them to the best of your ability. You first draft is like a lump of clay that you have shaped into something resembling the finished product. Now you can start to refine it. However, now you have parameters, you have limits. If you wrote a character that is a mother of two and decided to go back to school, then there are certain questions that story needs to answer. Like, what about the cost of day care? How does she manage it?  Now if you don’t have an answer for that, you have to figure it out because the reader will probably be asking that question.  So, you have your first dilemma.  However, if you haven’t actually written the scene and you ask yourself how she pays for day care, you can just say “okay, maybe I will make her a single, childless lawyer.” It doesn’t cost you anything to change your mind. If you wrote 500 words about the mother of two filling out FAFSA applications, you are less likely to solve the day care problem by erasing the children.  This was just a roundabout way of repeating what my playwriting professor, and Anne Lamott extolled.  Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.