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WriteOn: Anything Worth Doing... [1]
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Date: 2023-01-26
Welcome to WriteOn, the weekly series about writing in its many forms.
The first time I ran across the sentiment was in the 90s, and it was phrased as “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” At the time, I thought it was a funny take, and while the phrase stuck with me, I didn’t understand. Not really.
I’d already met two other versions of a similar sentiment. One was “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” The other was the motto of a friend’s class: “Perfect is pretty, but done is beautiful.”
There’s a strain of perfectionism that stops achievement in its tracks, by devolving into endless tinkering and impossible goals. In me, it’s paired with a focus entirely on the end product, and taking no pleasures in the process in between.
It’s January, which means it’s DaKoWriMo (the (non-November) Daily Kos Writing Month), and that’s a self-selected set of goals. Like my NaNoWriMo project, mine this month is a process experiment. I’ll get to that in a moment, but first let’s check in on progress:
DaKoWriMo Goals (Final Thursday) babushka -Colorado Open Thread Mondays until ColoTim is back -1/19 bonetti - check stuff off ToDo list: slow but solid 15 fundamental underlying tasks done - 1/19 dconrad - "editing my mess-in-progress. What goes in which chapter." — some progress as of 1/19. Mercy Ormont - "rewrite & try to finish memoir, Thirty-Nine Years On The Street." -on the backburner ‘til next week 1/19. mettle fatigue - "make progress, any kind"- progress being made. 1/19. NoBlinkers - 20k more words: 4k so far .. plus an idea…!!! -1/19 not a lamb - write at least 5 minutes a day- wrote a diary, staying on schedule 1/19. quarkstomper — continuing Dark Redemption- bogged down in excellent morass 1/19. RiveroftheWest - add factoids, 4 paintings & a doz. sketches illustrating WIP- cover art revised 1/19. ThurzdaysChild - one dedicated writing day per week, ready for beta reader by March or so: 2 ½ hrs of forward progress slogging thru’ reorganizing, revising, editing - 1/19 wandering in samsara - aiming for 5 min/day on rough draft of third quarter of WIP, logjam broken 1/192.
One way of conquering my form of procrastination, the one Dad kept trying to get me to do, is to break it down into steps and track those. Except he was good at envisioning the steps, and he usually had fixed goals at the end with a clear progression. Writing often isn’t like that, and the production steps after writing aren’t, really, either.
And in December, I ran across a completely different phrasing of “...worth doing badly.” It’s below the fold.
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