Musings from my writing desk + a dare for you..

I am writing this from my desk, where I have spent the last hour on Youtube checking pronunciations of obscure old words, preparing to record the audiobook of The Way of the Fearless Writer in London next week. The Japanese words are fine, but words in languages I have not studied in depth always make me nervous, because I never want to insult anyone by pronouncing anything wrong – a name, a place, a word – and a lot of the research for my books is done with the written word. I check, and check again, and then I remember there are such things as accents and individual speaking styles, which is why the pronunciation videos don’t all sound the same, and I research the written pronunciation guides, and I do my very best, and I remember that there comes a point when my best has to be good enough, or the thing will never get done.

When I research my books, I do everything I can to fact check and avoid typos. I interview people who know more than me about particular details. I pay experts to check my words.  The manuscript gets edited over and over. A proofreader reads the final version. And still mistakes slip through. There has been at least one typo in every single one of my books. I’m not proud of this, I am just acknowledging that it happens, however much you try to avoid it. To be honest, I have spotted at least one typo in nearly all of my favourite books. It makes me feel better to know that it happens to others too.

And ideas are never perfectly finished either. They are living, breathing things. They evolve, even after you have tried to pin them to a page.

But at some point the checking and the tweaking has to stop, because if I were to wait until the manuscript was perfect, I’d never leave my desk, and my books would never make it out into the world. If I waited until I was the writer I want to be, I’d still be working away secretly on my first book. We get better at what we do every time we do it, and doing our best matters, but it OK to know everything is a work-in-progress, as are we, and that nothing is ever quite finished, which means nothing is ever quite perfect, and that’s OK. That’s life.

I wonder, what have you been working on lately that you haven’t let go of yet, or allowed to be finished, because of a perfectionist tendency? What might happen if you gave it one more go, and then called it done? I dare you. There might just be other things waiting on the other side of this thing.

Wishing you a lovely week,

Beth

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