Perfect is the Enemy of Good

Voltaire famously said "Perfect is the enemy of Good," and I've never forgotte--  Okay, that's a lie.  I've heard that quote a half dozen times over the years, but always forget it, much less who said it.

What it means is, if you try to make something perfect, it gets in the way of . . .  Actually, I don't know what it means.*  All I know is that, as I continue to tinker with my story "The Washer Whispers," I was reminded of it.

I published "The Washer Whispers," a story I wrote in 2022, about a month ago (it was apparently the first week of March, when I double-checked), and the story was finished.  Except that I felt like it was missing something.  But a lot of times, enough months or years have passed since writing it that I get a fresh(er) perspective of the story when I do my rewrite, and I catch errors or moments where a scene should've been (for clarification, tension, or just to understand the character better).  Invariably, my stories get longer in the rewrite--sometimes considerably.

This was no exception.  

I often struggle with feelings that I am an inadequate writer, or that something I write that resonates with me might not resonate with a (potential) reader, and it keeps me from putting it out there.  There's the nagging voice in my head that, maybe if I made it juuuuuuuuust a little bit better . . .

There's a scene (largely unnecessary for the book, but my favorite of the scenes) where Gil sits down with the previous owner of the house, and asks him if he ever experienced anything supernatural.  The old owner (who I never give the age of, so probably should've been in his thirties or forties, though I voiced him as though he was at least retirement age) goes from grouchy to vulnerable to emotional and then to hostile.  And he tells about his wife's experience in the house (his late wife).  I gave this guy a high-pitched, pseudo-Arkansas accent and really enjoyed performing the scene, to the point that I doubled it in length, and eventually split it into two chapters.  This was me at my most indulgent, as the information could easily have been conveyed with Gil's daughter telling Gil about the conversation she had with the previous owner, who I gave the god-awful name of Alphonse Grindler.

By the way, this is the second time writing this blog post, as it somehow saved a blank document when I was done with it over the nearly-finished one--a little glimpse into the eternity of damnation that apparently awaits me for creating images such as this one:

I was editing the scene, and discovered Gil once refers to his daughter as his sister (which is understandable, since Caroline is inspired by my sister), so I set up the microphone to re-record that line, and then thought, "I'm going to add a bit of clarification in another paragraph in this scene," and did so.  I took an hour to do this and then splice it into the original recording . . . but I noticed that my voice quality was not the same between sessions (doing Gil's voice would absolutely wreck my vocal chords after an hour or so), so I went back and recorded a few other lines around it so it would be less noticeable.

I vaguely remembered there being a bit about Dreyer's ice cream, and when I looked in the document, sure enough, there was a section in there that didn't match what I had recorded (initially, he gives a single sentence to explain what happened with his wife, but at some point, I rewrote it to find out the whole story).  So, I plugged in the mic yet again to re-record that bit, and remembered a callback to the ice cream later, so I just decided to go ahead and re-do the whole rest of the chapter, through to the end.  I had not counted on doing so many takes, though, and by the time I reached the end of the chapter, my voice was absolutely cheese-grated.  

I only had four more sentences to go, but I was now coughing whenever I tried to read anything in that voice, so I decided to jump to the last line in the chapter (because I had changed the word "August" there to "summer," having discovered I used August as a metaphor for hot weather three times in a story that takes place during the schoolyear).  I redid that line, then ported it over, cleaned up the audio, and stuck it all together . . . and darn it, the two voices didn't match.  

Should I record it (yet) again?  'Cause it's still not perfect.

I found what I thought was a plothole (or at least, a plot . . . hairline fracture), and thought I could fix it by a single line by the voice from the dishwasher** saying, "There are things I'm not allowed to say."  But instead of sticking that into an earlier scene, I decided to create a new scene (a little one) where he asks the questions that I think the audience would ask, and she tells him nothing.   

Originally, I had a bit about it being too bad that my story's not about an alien being emerging from the dishwasher, 'cause this cover would be perfect.  But I'm just gonna let it sit here this time.

I mentioned Caroline, the daughter (sister?), and that reminds me: one time during the rewrite, I realized I had started calling her Carolina, so I did a Search and Replace for those, changing them all to Caroline***, but while I was editing the audio, I discovered there had been a "Carolina" that slipped through.  So I set up the mic again and re-recorded that bit, then re-published the text version.

But I started to think about that, and decided to put in an intentional Carolina around the middle of the story, as sort of an Easter egg that would affect only me (if this were a screenplay, I'd include a parenthetical that said, "Note that she says CAROLINA instead of CAROLINE," so they'd keep it in).  But that meant I had to set up the mic again and re-record that bit, then clean up the audio and splice it into the finished Chapter 10.  Worth it?  Probably not, but this is art, not science.

The story was getting better, I thought, but I kept finding things to fix, things that weren't perfect, and that's the whole reason for this blogpost.  Voltaire, you see, was right.

Yes, M. de Voltaire in a kitchen.

So, the story went from twelve chapters to fifteen, and from a bloated, overlong short story to a novella on the thin side.  And as Shelly Winters used to say, "It's better to be a skinny novella than a fat short story."

Still not quite perfect.  Yet.

*It certainly flies in the face of my religious upbringing, so maybe that says something.

**I made the mistake of calling the story "the WASHER whispers," not realizing that it tricked my brain into thinking it was about a washing machine, and oh, there were about nine examples throughout where I called the dishwasher the washing machine.  I hope you can forgive the, oh, eleven other uses of that word in the story, as well as the fact that I'll now spend the rest of my life calling the appliance by the wrong name.

*** Apropos of nothing, I once had a co-worker I quite liked named Carolina, and have never known a Caroline.

P.P.S. A week later, and I discovered the section I had highlighted to re-record had stayed highlighted, even after I re-re-re-republished it.  Whoops, still not perfect.