Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Discipline of imperfection
One problem I have with this type of instant publishing is that errors of multiple sorts creep in. I get all crazy about little things like having misspelled 'weird' in my response to my friend Joe's response on the previous post. I have words that in typing and writing by hand I often invert the letters of. Words with e before i seem to give me particular trouble. Oh, well, this instant publishing can perhaps teach me to relax my perfectionism on that front a little. I think I have posted before about this sort of perfectionism as a block against writing. I've wrestled with procrastination most of my life, and the other day I was reading something which discussed links between perfectionism and procrastination. In my experience that is spot on. I want something to be perfect, I know there is about a 99% certainty that it won't meet my desire for 'perfection', so I put off doing it at all. In this world of weird logic it is better not to have done a thing than to have done it imperfectly. I think it better (for me at least) to try and develop an approach where it is better to have done many different things, some which will stink, some which will smell fine, and some, if we're lucky, which will approach in some small way the natural beauty of a flower in bloom. I think of cooking. For years I barely cooked at all because I was such a perfectionist about it. I would try to follow a recipe, then I would freak out because I didn't have the tool they told me to use, or I had bought tartar sauce instead of cream of tartar, so I would throw up my hands, throw my disaster in the trash, and eat a bowl of cereal. Nothing wrong with eating cereal, but why did I feel that every time I tried to cook I needed to create a perfect dish? Now, I still don't cook a whole lot. But I like cooking and am able to roll with the inherent imperfections a little better. I'm a little more experienced and a little more patient with my self. I realize the value in doing things imperfectly over not doing them at all. Of course perfectionism is not all bad. I think it can help us people persist in some rather quixotic pursuits which we absolutely won't do unless perfect to our imagination. And if we can achieve the 'perfect' results we desired then we just might have made something whose 'rightness' will be a balm to us and perhaps even a joy to some other who shares the sense of the things 'perfection' and marvels at the obdurate effort of the creator to bring forth such a thing and then is maybe inspired to try and create something 'perfect' according to their lights... So, it is good to have a light touch when it comes to perfectionism. Don't hold on too tight or it might turn into a weapon which you are using against yourself, but don't let go completely because you may be able to do beautiful work with it if you can learn to use it well. Now, quick before I delete this post because I don't think it is 'perfect', I'm not going to reread it, and I'm not going to correct anything after it is posted, I'm just going to... hit.. the.. publish.. button.. now...
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5 comments:
If you care about how your post is going to turn out, a lot of people (not me) use a standard text editor (like Word) to write their posts/comments & then copy and paste it into Blogger to avoid simple mistakes. Somehow its easier to see mistakes there than in the comment/post box.
I used to consider editing elsewhere and then uploading the post en bloc. But now with Firefox there's a built-in spellchecker, which makes typos less likely. There's also a Firefox extension which lets one fire off an external editor for any field, but for some reason it won't let you do anything else while you're using the fired-off external editor. Actually TypePad and LiveJournal have built-in spellcheckers anyway. I guess Blogger doesn't? I better stop -- this paragraph is starting to look like a big set of product endorsements. :)
But WRT typos: I'll go back and fix up a typo that slips through -- I do it all the time. But if I substantially change the meaning of what I've written, I'll put in a note prefaced with "Edit:" or the like.
I think it is interesting the difference observed between seeing mistakes when composing in the comments box as opposed to a text editor. I totally think that holds for my experience. Basically I'm so lazy about all this that I guess I feel I need to save the small amount of energy I would have to expend to figure out some of these other options for composing which might assist me in checking for typos and other errors, and use that towards actually composing posts in the first place. But I also have to remember that I am yet a babe in these woods, by my reckoning. Although I have realized that this blog will be a year old next month. It is interesting to be involved in something which seems to be inherently a work in progress, and where we are all always learning, largely from each other, how to do different things with these 'work spaces' of ours.
Um, Elizabeth (he says, in nasal voice, pushing up his glasses) Word is not a text editor. Perhaps you were thinking of Wordpad or Notepad or Text Edit or Text Wrangler (Mac users). Oh jeeeeeezzzz....
I will often email a list of people only to follow up with a second email of minor corrections once I have read the poorly edited email I sent out. I thin it comes from being a neurotic old person. OMG! did you just see that?? I said I "thin" it comes from... Ha! Ha! Ha! How timely.
I teach supposedly smart kids at the University of WI how to write. I'm much rather interested in what they say over how they say it. Is that a cliche? Probably. Either way I'd rather Lucy Van Felt crank out interesting misspellings than nothing at all. Word.
Some really useful slides here. I've been looking for something like this to help with a research piece I've been working on.
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