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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; posted successfully so far - 1/26
bonetti - check stuff off ToDo list: slow but solid 20(ish) fundamental underlying tasks done - 1/26
dconrad - "several chapters done" - 1/26.
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"- “only a little progress made but pleased with it!” 1/26.
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- almost finished with main and half-finished with smaller one of the Captain - 1/26.
ThurzdaysChild - “fit in weekly writing 'appointment', & spent 2.5-3 hours working on it each Thursday in Jan” - 1/26
wandering in samsara - aiming for 5 min/day on rough draft of third quarter of WIP, logjam broken 1/19, completed a skeletal draft of “the dreaded third quarter” 1/26
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.
“Anything worth doing is worth half-assing.”
It’s funny how something heard one way doesn’t click, and heard another way does. Or perhaps it was the intervening years, and I was more receptive. To me, these were always things said to encourage others, not things that would let me look past the “if it’s not better than perfect, it’s not even close to done” rut that I’m often stuck in.
And it clicked, this time. Which led me to my goal for DaKoWriMo. Sure, I have an end goal in mind (a product ready to upload), and I do want it to be good, but I’m feeling my way toward completion. I haven’t done this before. It’s not going to be perfect no matter how long it takes. Good is good enough.
But the really weird part is — it applies more to the plan than the book. At least, this time. So what if my roadmap is bad? So what if I guessed at the steps wrong? As long as I’m still accomplishing things, it’s progress. And I can always revise the steps I still need to do.
So I’m checking things off a malleable list. So far, it’s included a few “no, that’s not going to work” items, which are a variation on Edison’s “I’ve found 10,000 ways it won’t work”. Such as “yeah, rendering the title in 3D in Blender has some nice effects, but boy color control is tricky and slow to iterate on”.
Has it worked? On the one hand, I have definitely made progress toward the end goal, and I can see both the road behind (for a change) and the road ahead. I’m closer to where I wanted to be, and I can take satisfaction with it.
I do have things I can point to. For instance, I have a world map (and related texture) so I can recreate the planet as needed. Similarly, one for the moon, and one for the main ship. (I’m still putting the finishing touches on it, but there are a dozen or more planned covers that will use it, so it’s worth the time spent.) I found a way to link (rather than copy) assets in Blender, and how to do overrides so I can create damage to the ship for a couple specific covers while keeping it linked to the original model. (It’s a lot like using a master document.)
On the other hand, I’m not quite there yet, in that I only have one near-final cover image. It’s a little weird building what will result in a production pipeline of sorts. (Which, I will say, appeals tremendously to the techie side of my brain.)
But it’s actual progress, which is the real goal of DaKoWriMo!
I hope your January has helped you take steps forward, too.
Happy writing!
Exercise: Write a quick scene incorporating these three words: “scholar”, “proud”, “abundant”. Use your WIP or the Stock Characters, and include at least one evocative description.
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