by Nan Lundeen
Inspiration or perspiration? Perfection or wild and free?
Thomas Edison’s quote that genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration is good news for those of us who slog away day after day hoping to unearth gems of inspiration. I’d venture to guess that most poetry and prose writers know that if you want to be a writer you can’t wait for lightning to strike. No, you have to sit down and actually write.
We also know that once we’ve ridden the waves of creative juices and produced a manuscript, even more perspiration is required to edit, rewrite, and polish. But how much to edit, rewrite, and polish? When is it done? I’ve heard writers say when their books were published, they felt relieved because they could stop rewriting.
The other day, my husband I and went to a flower show. There we saw the most perfect white rose in the entire universe! No, really! It was a Mozart symphony all by itself, every petal harmonious with the others. Homogenous perfection, it stood in a glass vase bedecked by a blue ribbon.
Later that day as I remembered the perfect white rose, a wild rose memory washed over me, a childhood memory of pink wild roses tumbling down the shoulders of Iowa gravel roads, perfect in their disarray. A few details, a metaphor, and a simile gave me a poem. Then the pruning began. But not a whole lot. As much as the perfect rose stirs my heart, the wild roses stir my soul. I can breathe near them; the perfect rose makes me nearly hold my breath.
How much do you strive for perfection as you write? As you edit, rewrite, and polish?
At a writing workshop I heard this advice: there’s a time to expand your work and a time to tighten. Sort of like a bellows. Can you visualize them—those contraptions with handles that breathe air onto a fire? Sometimes writing may need a breath of air. Even during editing, rewriting, and polishing, it isn’t always good to tighten, tighten, tighten. A manuscript might need more elucidation, more flights of fancy.
Robert Frost describes beautifully his Faraway Meadow’s anticipated return to wildness after it has been mowed for the last time ever in his poem “The Last Mowing.” He opens the poem by telling us “the talk at the farmhouse” is that “the meadow is finished with men.” He continues to say, “Then now is the chance for the flowers/That can’t stand mowers and plowers.”
The meadow is done with the tame. The place of the moment is ours For you, O tumultuous flowers, To go to waste and go wild in, All shapes and colors of flowers, I needn’t call you by name.
What do you prefer—perfection or wild and free? There is a time, I think, to let our words tumble wantonly down the shoulders of roadsides.
The author is grateful to the South Carolina Writers Workshop for first publishing this column in the Quill October 2012.
Great analogy, Nan. I tend to try to much for perfection from the first, which can be a hindrance to letting the story go. One of the writer/mentors at the Hub City workshop said you had to give yourself the right to have a shitty first draft. I need to let me wild flowers cascade even if they end up in a ditch.
Some interesting things float about in ditches.
I love the idea of a poem as a wild rose that needs some space to grow and spread out, no matter if it has to be pruned and shaped a little at a later time. You’ve given me an idea, Nan, for a poem about a rose bush that used to grow right up against my carport at my Amy Lane house. Thanks for another great column on writing!
I’m so glad. Happy writing!
I write for the joy of it and seldom worry about perfection, even when I need to. But then I write for me and for those who love me, not for a more critical public. I want my writing to be the best it can be, but I don’t want to tie it down too much. I spent plenty of time writing that way – for pay.
Absolutely! Creativity doesn’t tolerate being tied down.
Authenticity is rarely perfection; it is soulful. Gut wrenching. Humorous. Foul-mouthed, beautiful, and honest. Finding the courage to write such words with our inner and outer authorial critics looking over our shoulders, is another thing.
Ernest Hemingway said, “All you have to do is write one true sentence.
Write the truest sentence you know.”
Thanks Nan for another great post.
Happy to see you on the site, Sheila. You and Hemingway have posed an interesting challenge for all of us.