Battling perfectionism
I have an entire graveyard of abandoned creative projects — short stories I started to write and later grew to hate, a messy half-draft of a novel, film ideas still in sketch form.
A couple of years ago, Stephanie and I began working on a play we tentatively titled Korean Body Parts (yes, that’s what we called it). When Korean Body Parts was still an idea-seedling, we had big plans for it. It would be a fictional podcast/audio play. But why stop there? We could take it on a national, maybe even global, theatrical tour with a traveling cast and choose-your-own-adventure-style storylines. No two shows would be alike. I think there were at least a few days when we were pretty sure we had an amazing project on our hands.
We ended up writing a few scenes but quickly lost steam. To be honest, I don’t regret abandoning Korean Body Parts. It was a fun thought-experiment and creative exercise, but it was not our next big project.
But there are some long-buried projects I wonder about. Could they have been something if only I’d pushed through?
Over the years, I’ve learned something really important about myself: My favorite part of the creative process is the ideation phase. I love thinking up new characters and stories. I love playing around with concepts and ideas, using my imagination, following my curiosity. I love the endless possibilities.
But, alas, I can’t stay in that stage forever (and truthfully, I don’t want to). Because after ideation comes all of the work to turn that vision into something. Putting words on the page. Crafting a film treatment. Taking the footage we have and assembling a rough cut. And in the process of doing the work, there is inevitably a moment when my vision and my expectations for a project diverge with what I have in my hands.
I look at what I’ve started, and I think to myself this is terrible. That is when I most want to give up, when I find myself scrolling mindlessly through Instagram or getting pulled into a spiral of shame and discouragement. That’s when the next shiny idea becomes more alluring than the mess in front of me.
Thankfully, though, I have enough projects under my belt to know that this is just part of the process. In any film/video or writing project there is, without fail, a stretch when what I’m making is, well, bad. Or maybe not bad, but under development. A draft. A very, very rough cut. If I listen to the voice that tells me it’s terrible or, worse, irredeemable, I won’t do the messy, incremental work of experimentation, of trial and error. I won’t do what needs to be done to make it better. I won’t listen to feedback. I won’t edit, refine, polish. I won’t ever finish.
“Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend,” says writer Anne Lamott. With each new project, I learn this lesson all over again. With each new project, I learn to find a little more joy in the process.
— Monica