Perfectionism and the Feedback Cycle

I’m a recovering perfectionist.

I can’t really pinpoint when it started. But I did take music lessons as kid and studied piano throughout elementary and high school. My piano teacher was ferocious. She prided herself on being the best teacher in my hometown. Her students ranked first, second and third in every music competition, she had the best track record for pushing promising young musicians through the Royal Conservatory of Music, and many of her students got into the most prestigious post-secondary music programs.

My piano teacher scared me. She embodied such powerful “I’m not mad, I’m disappointed” energy that messing up at lessons became an ordeal of being weighed down with guilt and shame for not practicing harder. I was a passable student at best. I love music and I love piano, but is a complicated instrument. And when I was a kid (and especially when I was in high school and developing interests in theatre and writing), I didn’t have the attention span or the time to sit down and drill scales and arpeggios, do my studies, and then finally tackle my assigned repertoire.

Classical music demands perfection—not a note out of place, no rhythm out of sync. And it takes time and an awful lot of work to develop that level of precision. I would habitually practice the same opening phrases again and again because I would stop as soon as I hit a wrong note, go back to the beginning and try again. From the top. Ad nauseum.

The overall outcome of that habit was, of course, that I’d only learn about 15% of a piece. I’d never get to the rest of it because I was so focused on making the first part “perfect” before moving on that I never would move on.

When I first started writing regularly, it was the mid 2000s, I was in high school and I was knee-deep in Star Wars fan fiction. I couldn’t wait to finish school and get my homework out of the way so I could sit down the write. I was fueled by the adrenaline rush that came from posting my work online and seeing the comments rush in.

Because the forum I was a part of was owned by Lucasfilm, the entire site was rated PG-13 and, from what I can remember, was fairly well-moderated. There were writers from all walks of life circulating the fan fiction forums and a robust subforum dedicated to writing resources and discussing things like plot structure, character development, and other such things. It was a safe place for a teenaged writer to learn how to write and, for all intents and purposes, I learned more about writing from those forums than I did in my grade 12 creative writing class.

When I think about those years and the sheer amount of writing I finished (short form stories, long form novels, collections of flash fiction, totaling around 50 individual completed works), I think that was the last time I had an unrestricted period of boundless creativity in my life. I had an idea and I would go for it. I didn’t stop to think about every single aspect of what I was writing and judge whether it was a good writing choice or a bad writing choice, I was just do it. And even if it was the height of silly, nonsensical, cliché-fueled garbage, I still wrote it. I finished it.

I had an idea and I would pursue it fearlessly until it was done, perfection be damned.

Almost every writing mentor I’ve had, both during my undergrad and graduate programs, have stressed the importance of finishing your work. These are seasoned professionals: published authors, produced playwrights, optioned screenwriters, people with decades of experience in the industry.

The first draft is always the worst. Sometimes it’s a battle between you and your wandering attention span. Sometimes you’re clawing out progress word by word until you stumble over the finish line, other times you’re gleefully running over it in a caffeine-fueled sprint because you’re so close to being done you might as well just get it done, mistakes and bad writing be damned.

You can’t share something that doesn’t exist and your first job as a writer is to make it exist. The quality doesn’t matter—that can always be handled in re-writes and edits.

I was a teaching assistant for a playwriting class during my MFA. We had a class of stressed out theatre students who wanted to hand in incomplete plays for their final assignment. Because the class’ structure taught a different playwriting element every week, the students were supposed to be writing their one-act plays in tandem with every lesson. Do your final play’s plot structure for the class where we talk about plot structure. Write your opening scene for the class where we talk about opening scenes. Write your first major piece of dialogue for the class where we talk about dialogue.

The problem with this format was that the students spent so much time working on and revising the first half of their plays for class assignments that they’d completely forgotten about the back half. Facing an extremely stressful semester stuffed with performances, exams and far too many essays, many of them were in tears because they felt they couldn’t finish their plays to the same level of quality as the existing material. Some of them didn’t want to write new material at all—they just wanted to keep poking at the first half because they’d received a discouraging note in the last class and they felt they needed to rewrite the entire beginning to fix the problem before moving on to new material.

This was something I empathized with, as I was facing my own version of it in my graduate program. This is not something that is often talked about in writing circles, at least from my own experiences. While university writing classes push that idea of “a finished project is better than an unfinished one,” they rarely talk about what comes after:

The demand to constantly be perfecting and improving through a rigorous, ongoing editing progress.

Because no writing is perfect. There’s always something to improve, something that could have been done better. Write it, and then write it again. Fiddle with it. This scene doesn’t work—take it out, re-write it, put it someplace else. This scene is too long—edit it down, rip it apart, and put it back together piece by piece until you fix the pacing.

Writing is a tapestry that has been pulled apart and patched so many times that it becomes impossible to tell what changes were actually for the better and which ones were not.

No matter what you do, no matter how much you edit and re-write, someone, somewhere is always going to have a problem with your work. Something that they personally feel is shoddily written and could have been better if the author cut it out or did something different with it.

One of the hardest things about being what the theatre industry calls an "emerging playwright" is that every time your unproduced plays are workshopped somewhere new, there is an inevitable flood of comments from the people involved in the workshop about the changes that could improve the work.

If you did this instead of that, this part would feel so much stronger narratively.

This part didn’t work for me, what if you did this…?

This dialogue doesn’t make sense, why do they talk like this?

I don’t understand this character. Why are they here? Do we need them?

Why does the 17th century noblewoman say fuck all the time? It’s anachronistic, this isn’t Game of Thrones!

I don’t like this character.

I hate this plot line.

Why did so-and-so do that?

I think you should get rid of these four characters and only focus on these two here. Why is your cast so big?

This part is weak. This part is weak. This part is weak.

“It’s so close, Anna, it’s just not quite there. Act 2 needs some more work. Maybe a few more revisions…?”

Your new work—which is quickly turning into something that isn’t really “new” as the years go on—is constantly scrutinized by people who think their feedback is the most important feedback. Everyone has an opinion on how you could better your work.

So you go and you revise and you take that feedback into account as best you can. You push out a few more revisions, and then next time your play is workshopped, the feedback cycle starts all over again.

Because nothing is perfect. Nothing can be perfect.

There is always going to be something to fix.

And sometimes you have to say: “I am done editing this. I know there are problems, but I’ve done as much work on this as I can, to the best of my current ability.”

The first time I opened my graduate thesis post-defense, I spotted a typo. Too late now. The document is uploaded and published to the online library, I can’t get it back. I can’t make any more changes. It’s out of my hands. I’m just going to have live knowing that typo is living in the university servers forever more. (And also Act 2 will perpetually need more work).

There are always going to be mistakes. There are always going to be weak points in a creative work, things that could have been done better. And there are justified reasons for why those weak points exist:

Maybe the writer didn’t know how to fix them. Maybe they were bled dry of ideas and that was the best they had. Maybe they were rushing to meet a deadline and they had to take the first idea that came to them.

Writing isn’t piano. It isn’t classical music. With time and practice, I can fix the fact that I can’t do the ornaments in a Chopin waltz without messing up the rhythm in the left hand. Writing is relentlessly and beautifully subjective and someone, somewhere is always going to have a problem with it.

I recently saw a post cross my feed that talked about how you can’t go 100% with every project. Achieving 80%, or striving for “good enough,” is more than enough. I wholeheartedly agree. You can’t achieve perfect. Making peace with the fact that your writing is always going to have problems and weak points and things you could have done better is part of the process. Trapping yourself in a relentless cycle of feedback to try to meet everyone’s expectations is only going to result in 1) never moving on to new projects or 2) an endlessly unfinished work.

Wayfarer holds a unique position among everything I have ever written. By the sheer force of its nature as a sprawling, triplicating, interactive fiction game, I am forced to achieve no more than an 80% or “good enough”. The game is so large and contains so much content, that it would be physically and mentally impossible for me to even try to go for 100% with every written word.

Because it is extremely difficult to edit the game’s text after it is coded, I have to make hard and fast decisions about the game’s quality and content before I code. And once it is in the game, I can make minor adjustments, but I can’t rip out entire sections and re-write them ad nauseum.

There are parts I know could have been better written. Or more tightly edited. There are weird sentences and some sections are patchy or boring because I was speeding through a scene I didn’t like and wanted the content to be done. There are sections that probably don’t need to exist, but cutting it out now would mess up the code.

I can’t afford an editor right now, so I do all my editing myself and I know that impacts the quality of the written text. I have a beta reader who go through everything before I code it, but he's a reader, not an editor. My playtesters catch dozens upon dozens of typos, missing words, spelling mistakes and other grammar issues should have been caught earlier, but due to the sheer amount of words, even a second or third or fourth pair of eyes on the text don’t catch everything.

As we get closer to the completion of Chapter 1 and the true public launch, I get more worried about receiving unsolicited criticism about the game’s content and writing. And I’m trying not to stress too much about it, because it’s out of my hands. There are sections of Chapter 1 that exist in the current publicly accessible build that could have been better written. There are elements that people are not going to like. Because there are always things people will not like, regardless of how many re-writes I do.

And that needs to be fine. Wayfarer can’t be perfect.

Perfection is not in its nature. And I'm trying not to let it be in mine.