Tag: writing community

The 70% solution?

‘If you’re roughly 70% happy with a piece of writing you’ve produced, you should publish it.’

Something that sometimes hinders my progress as a writer is this nagging sense that whatever I create must be somehow perfect, and that whatever I’m working on — whether it’s the first draft or the fifteenth — is that maybe I need to remove the comma I inserted last time, or cut a word here or there, or even entire sentences. If I just tweak it a bit, I reason, it will be ready to submit.

(Seems odd to confess this here and now, given my recent post about my tendency to rush to get a story submitted to a publication. (Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself, as Walt Whitman put it.)

A lot of other writers also grapple with their inner perfectionist, so I know I’m not alone.

Anyway, I was heartened to discover a nugget of writing advice to quiet the perfectionist in me.

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Tom Robbins and the flexibility to endure

When I got the news yesterday that novelist Tom Robbins died last weekend (at age 92; how could he have been that old?), my memory swooped like the long-extinct Kauaʻi ʻōʻō back, back, back to 1981 or ’82 or so, when I first encountered Robbins’ writings in the form of his novel Still Life With Woodpecker.

A journalism student at the time and steeped in the dreary, staid, humorless learnings of newswriting, I read Still Life as a guilty pleasure. (I’m grateful to my girlfriend at the time who lent me her copy of this book, the perfect antidote to my gloomy, humorless J-school student outlook.) The way Robbins played with the language — even when he was over the top with it, which was often — enthralled me, and for a long time, throughout my college years and beyond, I tried on his writing style to see how it would fit.

Continue reading “Tom Robbins and the flexibility to endure”