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Originally Posted by gmw
Each time I revisit something, whether it's mine or someone else's, it's different. How can perfection exist for something that changes with every view, that changes with the viewer?
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The work itself doesn't change. The only thing that changes is the dynamic participation of the reader and, in that sense, the writer who rereads their work.
Reading one's work is very much like listening to (and, in a way, performing) a piece of classical music.
The experience, mood and perspective of the writer changes all the time, like that of the reader. Why, then, are certain novels perceived to be good and others bad? Because the novels we deem to be good survive the vicissitudes of constant change in ways that the authors themselves might not recognize.
We aspire to perfection (or some other working ideal -- total fidelity to the voice of the character, etc.) in our word choices and so many other aspects of craft, knowing that our experience of the work will change from hour to hour. If we keep working on the same story endlessly, we might come to memorize it, and so it might give us the illusion of a static experience. But when we return to it later, it is very often new again, and we can still find dead ends and dropped threads, can still fix issues we hadn't noticed before because, as Heraclitus would have said, for us, the novel we've stepped into isn't the same novel.
The changing nature of what's experienced (the novel) seems to contradict the illusion of changeless coherence which we impart to ourselves (identifying with the novel or inflicting ideas which no longer apply dynamically). That's one of the reasons a writer can never truly judge their own work.
That's part of what makes writing fun, but I don't see it as preventing perfection's ideal. I personally go through about twenty drafts per story; revisions on a novel seem never to stop.
The other question is when a writer should finish as opposed to wanting to finish. Some writers actually have to learn to stop revising because they're going to make the prose stiffen and lose its flow.
If I were that kind of writer, I'd have had to learn to stop. But through the depressing experience of going back to the first draft after the ninth and discovering that aspects of the first one were better, I've learned how to revise without losing the groove of the style and story. If I weren't a perfectionist, I'd have shrugged and stopped revising entirely and the quality of the writing would have suffered.
Musicians are like that, too, when recording a track. Some are one-take musicians -- their first performance is their best -- others get better with time, and the rare few are perfect every single time you record them.
In my experience, engineers love first-take musicians because the session has no choice but to move quickly. Producers who like to spot-check arrangements and even try different ideas (that would be me) prefer musicians who fall into the second and third categories because they're always up to the challenge of sculpting the performance.
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She says "never being satisfied" - which does suggest beating yourself up over not being perfect, rather than acknowledging that you wrote what you were then. It may not be what you are now, but that doesn't mean you need to be dissatisfied with it, nor does it mean that you can't aspire to do better.
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I, too, would say I'm never satisfied, yet I don't beat
myself up at all -- that's the discipline. You aspire to make the work perfect, but the work isn't you. The phrase with which I take issue is "lifelong sadness." As I said before, I would
never equate dissatisfaction with sadness. The writing is not you intrinsically, it is a thing which ultimately exists outside you. Dissatisfaction makes people rearrange their furniture, whereas sadness can make them stop caring about their surroundings entirely. For me, dissatisfaction leads to making new choices, which tends to be fun. I usually pretend I'm fixing someone else's mistakes: "What has that twit done now?"