015: Quickly, perfectly, or not at all?
Hi friends,
I’ve been having trouble writing since I moved to the new house. Everything is chaos here. There’s currently a bathroom vanity in my living room, waiting to be installed. All the cabinet doors in my kitchen are on the floor, waiting for their second coat of paint. Nothing has a place yet, and almost everything lives in bright blue IKEA bags. It’s exciting, but it’s also distracting and exhausting.
Renovating a house—even when the changes are mostly cosmetic, like what I’m doing—is such a slow and long process. It’s meandering: Full of surprises, and more trips to The Home Depot than you thought survivable. Shows make it seem quick—an entire house in 90 days! But when you live a life outside your renovations (and don’t have a team of professionals at your disposal), it’s not quick. It’s a full week of carefully tiptoeing your way around cabinet doors drying on your floor. It’s over a month of not having your books out of boxes because there are no shelves to put them on.
But I’ve never lived my life this way. Both in the literal sense that my parents never moved our family into fixer-uppers when I was a kid, but also in the metaphorical sense. I’ve never had to do projects in slow, spaced-out stages like this.
Remember when we were timed on one-mile runs in school? I always used to flat out sprint as much as I could so that I could just lay in the grass and talk to my friends the rest of gym class. As my friends finished their pattern of “run on the straights, walk on the curves” of the looped track, I’d catch up with each in turn about their weekend, their crushes, their homework. By the end of Mile Day, I always knew all the gossip (and spread it, like a monster). Meanwhile, my coaches were always impressed I could run a sub-6-minute mile on my tiny legs, and as an anxious child, I really thrived on that validation. I learned that doing things hard and fast, that finishing first was the right way to impress the adults around me.
And so I always worked fast. I was always the first in a room to finish, even if the test arguably determined my future, like AP tests, the PSAT, the SATs, the LSAT, the GRE. If it was timed, I raced through it. One time I finished a 60 question test in 10 minutes flat, but I missed a key instruction and got an entire section of the test wrong. I never forgot about it. (The instruction I missed was “Pick the least correct option.”) And so I trained myself to read faster, and faster, and faster so I’d never miss an instruction like that again because I was hurrying. I timed myself, I memorized words, I worked hard in private so I could work fast in public.
There were exceptions, of course. As I got older I became more of a perfectionist with certain things, especially my writing. I knew that finishing fast didn’t matter if I also got all the answers wrong, so I studied hard. But I also pretty readily accepted the maxim that done is better than perfect.
For a long time, I have carried this lesson with me: If I can’t do things perfectly, then I will do them quickly. That’s been my approach to everything, for almost my whole life. And I can see with the benefit of hindsight that everything I’ve ever tried, I’ve allowed to fall into one of those two categories. Done perfectly or done quickly.
And when things couldn’t fall into one of those categories? I despaired and dragged my feet and whined. I quit. I’ve quit so many things because I couldn’t do them perfectly or quickly. The bookstore, the coffee app, running, screenwriting, relationships, etc, etc, etc. How many dreams of mine have fallen victim to that false dichotomy of perfect or quick?
Because—and I’ve refused to acknowledge this for years, though I think I’ve known it since at least my teens—Because very little in life can be done quickly or perfectly.
Sprinting the full mile got me the praise of my coaches, but it didn’t teach me a dang thing about how real life works.
We don’t get to do a lot of sprinting and then sitting in the grass. Real life is more “running the straights and walking the curves.” Real life is often the unsexy act of pacing yourself, of resting and starting again, of dragging yourself across a finish line last, covered in sweat and dirt.
This house is forcing me to confront that. Cabinets can’t be refinished in an afternoon. They just can’t. They can’t be done quickly and, because they’re old and I’m new to this, they won’t be done perfectly either. I have to put in the slow, dragging work of sanding down then building up layers of primer and paint. Each layer has to dry for hours before I can put on the next layer. That’s just the way it is.
So of course, now I’m starting to see why so many people use building a house as an analogy for writing a book. You can’t do it all in an afternoon. Building houses and writing books don’t happen quickly. And while they’re happening, they don’t happen perfectly. I’ve known this about writing books for years—hello, I worked on the same first book in a series for almost 20 years before finishing it. (I’ll tell that story someday.)
There were several times that I quit writing the book, only to come back to it again a few weeks or months later. With the house, I don’t really have that option. If I quit doing the cabinets, then they’re just going to…stay on the floor. If I don’t install the new vanity, I not only have to be annoyed by the lack of storage in the bathroom forever, I also have to live with a sink in my living room forever. For the first time ever, I can’t quit. I have to see this project through.
For the first time in 30 years, I’m up against a project I can’t just…quit. Everything else in my life I could quit if it wasn’t going perfectly or quickly. Even when I didn’t quit (and, to be fair to myself, there are a lot of difficult things I started that I didn’t quit, like my Master’s degree) I always knew it was an option. This time, it’s not an option.
So I’m trying to carry that mentality over into my writing. Writing is hard right now when my pantry is an IKEA bag and my clean laundry is an IKEA bag and the cabinets still need to be done ffs, but I’m taking quitting off the table. My research is slowing down because, well, I don’t know where the hell my books are in all this chaos, but I’m taking quitting off the table. Balancing my job and Go Fund Bean and the house and writing these newsletters and my research and the next book is hard, and it’s a new kind of stress I’ve never had a chance to experience, but I’m finally shedding the idea that any of it needs to be done quickly or perfectly.
It’s okay that this newsletter took me three hours to write.
It’s okay that my research has dragged long past my graduation date, and will continue into 2021.
It’s okay that it took my writing partner and me 20 years to write our book, and that it will probably take us several more years to see it published, to finish the series, to feel like it’s complete.
It’s a new challenge, doing things in tiny steps instead of sprinting through them. It’s hard for me to plan for doing just a little bit at a time. But I have a good feeling about it.
As always, thank you for reading. If you want to respond just hit reply. Your message will get to me (and only me). If you like this and think your friends might too, feel free to forward it on.
I’m focusing all the energy I used to focus on freelance writing on my Patreon! You can support this project to finish my MA research and publish a book for three months for less than the cost of one cocktail! All donors get access to my research, and higher-level donors get access to book reviews, behind-the-scenes stuff, and more.
I keep these newsletters free by not worrying too much about typos and flow. But if you want to you can tip me, as a treat.
If you received this email from a friend and you liked it, you can subscribe to this irregularly written series over here.
xx,
Valorie
Photo by free-photos.