For the first time in my life, I’ve been called a perfectionist in my writing–and by a writer I greatly respect. That’s quite a compliment for a person who has struggled most his life to reach what he considers even a modicum of competence.
(Although, uh, maybe those are somehow connected.)
Brief, terrifying window into my psyche: When I was small, my father planted a row of trees on the far edge of our property, beyond the reach of our hose. Instead of buying another hose, he assigned me the job of dragging full buckets of water as tall as my chest out to the trees to water them. One time, bullies from the neighborhood tossed sand in the bucket and told me that I’d kill the trees if I used the tainted water. Completely gullible and more than a little scared about my father’s likely reaction to my murder of the trees, I dumped out the water and went back for another bucket.
I’m not sure if that’s when it all started or not, but I’ve had a hard time for most of my life doing either way too much for a task or way too little. On the one hand, I feel that anything worth doing is worth overdoing; I consider “Holy shit! Who would do all that?” to be a great compliment for my work. On the other hand, I’ve gotten a little too good at rationing my efforts for the things I love, learning from my work as a technical writer how to short-circuit tedium by arguing against it; the answer to 90% of technical issues really is to do nothing at all.
So I guess I see myself more as a “close-enough-ist” except under the following conditions:
- If the resulting work requires so much effort or speed that it absorbs my attention and permits no distractions.
- If I’m panicked by a deadline.
- If the product I deliver would be completely surprising or unbelievable to the person receiving it, such as an automated program to convert a thousand files instead of the ten I was supposed to convert by hand.
- If the work is aimed at a specific person like a gift, such as the little short-story cards I sometimes send to people or the stories I read around the fire at Willcon.
I guess my main motivation is confounding expectations. Expect a lot of me and I’ll work insanely hard to justify it, depending upon who you are. Expect very little of me and I’ll work insanely hard to amaze you, depending upon who you are. In the middle is the big fluffy area of “close enough,” the work anyone can do.
My third grade teacher Mrs. Jones nailed it when she wrote on my report card, “Will finds it painful to complete assignments which do not inspire his avid imagination and sometimes does not finish the assignment. However, given something he really likes, no one could do the job better.”
I need to get better at controlling that consciously, I think.