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Transcript

Allow Yourself to Make Mistakes · The Daily Writer

• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Daily Rider, where we share a lesson each day to help you cultivate the habits for creative success.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: As you make progress toward your writing goals, sometimes you run into roadblocks.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Life gets messy, you get tired, and sometimes you just feel like giving up.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: But why is it that we feel like giving up?
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it all comes down to unrealistic expectations.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: We get discouraged when the picture that we have in our head of what our writing should be like doesn't match the messy reality in front of us.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: We see our own work and we see how imperfect it is and sometimes how it feels like a total mess, and we assume that those great books we love or any great work of art started out as perfect and it always stayed that way.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: But that's not the case.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Take the classic 1972 movie, The Godfather, for example.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: There's a scene in the later half of the movie where Sonny Corleone, played by James Kahn, hunts down his brother-in-law Carlo because he had beaten up his wife Connie.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: Now Connie is Sonny's sister, and Sonny is not only protective of Connie, he's also a major hothead, which is a theme that runs through the whole movie of The Godfather.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: So Sonny finds Carlo hanging out in a neighborhood street, and they get into a fight naturally.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: He has Carlo up against a wall and he starts punching him.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: However, because of the camera angle, you can clearly see that James Con is not really hitting the actor playing Carlo.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, that's what you'd expect since this is a movie, but it's a flaw that is so obvious and you can see they're so far apart, it makes the fight a little bit comical.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: However, that doesn't detract from the Godfather's greatness.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, to me it makes the film more endearing because it's a work of art made by humans who were operating on a tight budget and a tight production schedule.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: Every great work of art has flaws and mistakes.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Does this mean we shouldn't strive for excellence?
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, of course not.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: We should do everything we can to make sure our writing flows well and that we're using proper grammar, punctuation, and so forth.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: But after we've done these things, there comes a point where we can no longer improve it.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: Everything that we do to try and improve it only actually makes it worse the longer we continue to mess with it and tweak it endlessly.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: At some point we just have to release the thing out into the world and move on to the next thing.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: As Scott Adams, the creator of the comic strip Dilbert, once said, creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: Art is knowing which ones to keep.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: So don't get hung up on the myth of perfectionism.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: You're never going to be perfect, and there's no such thing as perfect writing.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: But that's exactly what makes your writing so perfectly human.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for listening to today's episode.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: For more, you can visit us at dailywriterlife.com.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, and I'll see you tomorrow.