January 1, 2008

Dept. of New Year's Resolutions

Why you should celebrate your inner slacker

At 10 a.m. on Dec. 24, I found myself in a chair at the endodontist's office, being grimly informed that I needed a root canal. Actually, I was the only one who was grim -- the endodontist seemed positively gleeful and his assistant displayed the barely suppressed enthusiasm of Sweeney Todd's Mrs. Lovett. So gung ho were they, they were prepared to set to work immediately, digging and tunneling. But, after performing a brisk risk analysis, I declined, concluding the pain I knew was preferable to the pain I didn't.

Foolishly imagining the holidays could hold no other surprises in store, I awoke Christmas morning to a phone call from my sister. Although she had planned to host Dec. 25 dinner, her six-year-old was down for the count with a nasty bout of gastro. And dinner -- for 17 -- needed to be moved to my house.

Thus, I gave up all hope of the "perfect" Christmas.

I think it's fair to say that those of us who celebrate Christmas (and for those who don't, I promise there is a writing connection here), have been led astray by the twin forces of Victorian propriety and 21st century consumerism. The presents need to be perfect, the house decorations must be exquisite, the meal just so. Of course, in our hearts, we know this is misguided. Don't we say to each other, "I'm not going to go overboard this year" or "It's going to happen whether I'm ready or not," or "This isn't the true meaning of Christmas"?

Yet still we persist in our secret, guilty quest of perfection. And I believe a similar guilty impulse infects our writing as well. We so desperately want to do a good job that we lose all sense of proportion about our work. We delay writing, telling ourselves we don't have enough time or the conditions aren't correct. But the truth is, we don't want to face up to our inadequacies.

If we wrote far enough in advance to allow ample time for editing, we'd have to take full responsibility if the resulting work was no good. I'm convinced this is the major reason marketing managers, college students (and others) so often fail to start reports until the night before they're due. It's not so much procrastination as it is perfectionism.

Even when we can persuade ourselves to write, we don't trust ourselves. Determined to have a perfect piece, we fret and worry, changing words, moving around sentences and generally refusing to let our thoughts flow onto the page without being immediately "fixed" by our internal editors. (Imagine if we tried speaking that way! Our conversations would be halting and tedious.)

So, now I've made it safely to New Year's Day, I've decided that my big writing resolution this year will be to nurture the opposite of perfection. That is, I intend to celebrate my inner slacker. This doesn't mean being satisfied with crummy, lazy writing. It simply means allowing the first draft to emerge without worry, complaint or too much effort. By being relaxed and lackadaisical -- bereft of expectation -- at this stage, I will be in much better shape to be uncompromising at the editing stage, when being stern is actually helpful.

As for Christmas, well, mine turned out better than you might imagine. The turkey, cooked by my restaurant-trained brother, was golden, the nephews didn't trash the house, and the confetti another sister had ill-advisedly stuffed into homemade Christmas crackers vacuumed up relatively easily. Oh, and I finally had my root canal, uneventfully, on Dec. 27.

Christmas 2007. Not perfect. But good enough.