Perfect is the enemy of done, and done is the engine of more.

I’m intimately familiar with the first half of the above sentence. The second half? That’s the space I dream of occupying, the undergirding frame I want to support my creative work, the stable constant around which I want to build my creative life.

In 2015, I registered for an academic conference, and the conference organizer sent out an unusual email in the months prior: noting that several participants were musicians, he invited anyone interested to record a song for a kind of “conference compilation CD” to be shared with all participants. I leapt at the chance to contribute–the combined power of an invitation AND a deadline!–and began immediately putting something together. I didn’t have much time, so I started with an acoustic guitar, settling on the first satisfying chord progression that came to me. I found a drum loop that provided the right feel, and strung together a few sections that could constitute verses, a chorus, and a bridge. Within a couple hours, I had the bones of the music.

I liked where things were headed, but I wanted lyrics. At the time, I was working on my dissertation and beginning the grueling process of applying for academic jobs. A question my wife and I were considering was whether we’d be willing to have me move away from the family temporarily to get settled before the family would follow, which isn’t an uncommon situation in academia. We ultimately decided against that, and this debate and decision felt appropriate for the tone of the music that was emerging. I wrote the lyrics out in one sitting, tweaked them over the next couple days as I recorded more polished tracks, and then my wife and I sang the vocals one evening when we had a few hours to spare. That whole process, from invitation to composition to finished recording, took less than a week.

What followed, however, was an obsessive pursuit of the perfect mix. With each passing day, I would endlessly alter things, chasing some ideal I heard in my head–a kind of “I’ll know it when I hear it” with no actual clue what I was looking for. Day after day passed, the deadline rising up before me. What started as pure delight turned into pure stress. Instead of being thrilled to share my song with friends and colleagues, I had nothing but uncertainty and doubt about my contribution. And then, of course, the irrational fear of failure, as if there was such a thing in this scenario. Intellectually, I knew this was a supportive, enthusiastic environment and audience, but emotionally, I was consumed with worry about some unrealistic (and, more importantly, unnecessary) high and imagined standard I was setting for myself.

I’m still embarrassed remembering the day of the deadline. When I realized I couldn’t tinker/delay any longer, I sent my file to the organizer. Within 20 minutes, I sent him a revision of it. Within 2 hours, I sent him a third version. The following morning, after working all night on my vocal effects chain, I sent him a fourth. He was gracious beyond reasonable, and when I saw him at the conference, he had nothing but kind words. And I was pleased enough with the final result, but then I listened to the compilation. Certainly, some of the recordings had the kind of professionalism I had been aiming for, but a healthy number of them were clearly done in a single take with a handheld recorder (maybe even a phone) in less than optimal recording conditions. And you know what? They were all wonderful. The organizer’s goal of sharing music with each other was beautifully managed, regardless of how those recordings sounded. In the end, my greatest pleasure was not that I’d been able to contribute; it was that no one actually knew how much time, energy, and frustration went into attempting to make this thing perfect, which of course it wasn’t. Even now, six years later, I hear the song and know exactly what I’d keep working on if I let myself go back to it. Sigh.

This week, Trauman and I watched Jack Conte (founder of Patreon and half of the incredibly talented and creative band Pomplamoose) talk about “working to publish.” He explained that the word “finish” evokes a sense of finality, accomplishment, and relief that simply isn’t present in creative acts. We’ve all likely heard the quote about works of art never being complete, only abandoned, but that’s only the problem–not the solution. Conte suggests adopting a mindset of publishing, rather than finishing. This involves moving not only the target (aiming to put something out instead of making it perfect) but also moving the location of where we think about publishing. Rather than coming at the end of process, working to publish begins, well, at the beginning. Every choice we make moves us toward being done, which is tangible, instead of moving us toward perfect, which is intangible and unattainable.

So now I stare down a new project. Not a single song, but an album. A big, scary, exciting project, one that I feel is demanding something from me. It’s asking me to commit to it, to invest myself in a way that feels risky. To care about it enough to give it life, to love it, and to let it fly the nest–not when it’s perfect, but when it’s done.

Perfect is the enemy of done, and done is the engine of more.

Turning to the second half of that sentence, I know I’m not going to finish this project without embracing the need for more. I think this is why I have a growing collection of guitar riffs and lyrical snippets, but zero finished songs. The creative energy and preparatory work is leading to a mountain of exciting but currently unpublishable material. And it’s not everyone’s goal to publish their work–working for pleasure, Conte notes, is valid. Even in the context of someone wanting to publish, as I do, it’s useful and necessary. But it’s too easy to let perfect stand in the way of done, or least that’s been my personal experience. This project is ambitious, and I don’t have a real (i.e. external) deadline related to anything other than whatever time I have left on this planet. That might be the biggest threat to whether this thing will ever see the light of day.

Something I’ve learned while writing this is that I don’t want to be great (OK, I do), but I want to be prolific. I want these worlds of creative ideas in my head and heart to manifest. I want others to see and hear and feel them, too, and to inspire them to birth their own worlds. I want us to revel in our imaginations, marvel at our humanity, commiserate over our broken parts, and celebrate the indestructible goodness of our ability to create something that didn’t exist before.

Let’s say it once more, with feeling: Perfect is the enemy of done, and done is the engine of more.

Part Two

I think, when it really comes down to it, this must be in some way about fear. Rereading what I wrote above doesn’t feel authentic. No, that’s not quite right. It’s authentic–that’s what I think and feel–but it’s not complete. To be vulnerably honest, the biggest stress I felt over that song was that I was afraid I wasn’t good enough to impress my friends. Every little detail in the mix that I heard stick out or draw attention to itself in some way… those were the minute elements I spent all that time on. It was like playing Whack-a-Mole. No matter how hard I worked to polish this thing to a shine, each pass would reveal something new I thought needed fixing.

In the end, I wasn’t actually polishing my song; I was grinding it down. In my pursuit of perfection, I turned every unique edge into the same flat surface. After each revision, I’d blow off the dust–the inspired, magical, joyful bits I steadily worked into powder–and eyeball this lump in my hand that inched steadily away from the object I thought I was making. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy enough with it. With apologies for the double negative, I don’t think it shows I don’t know how to make a decent enough recording.

We talked about discouraged perfectionism in the first episode, and this is at least in part a manifestation of that. It also highlights the difference of audience. Who was that song for, really? Or maybe more accurately, what was my goal in sharing it with them? It’s not easy to be this honest, but I wanted their admiration. And I suppose I wanted their praise. Affirmation that this was something I should be doing–something I deserved to be doing, that I had a right to spend my time on. To invest my heart in. To dream about. To not apologize for.

Catching the Big Fish

I wrote my first real song in the summer after 6th grade, the year I started playing guitar. I’d been visiting my grandparents on my own at the Lake of the Ozarks where they’d retired to a small house on a cove with a dock where we’d fish and swim and play. A few days into my visit, my grandpa showed me how he strung a trotline. Like every project I ever saw my grandpa do, it began on a yellow legal pad, with him sketching it out in pencil and jotting down notes, dimensions, and materials. He explained how he suspended it mid-depth with a combination of large rocks and empty plastic jugs, which doubled for bobbers. We’d fill it with bait (shad) in the afternoon, and every morning, my job was to wake up and go to the window to see if any of the jugs were dancing. We caught something almost every day, mostly catfish, starting with two the first day, a 3-pounder and a 12-pounder, which my grandma fried up for dinner after soaking them in 7-up to “take the lake out of ‘em.”

A few days later, one of the jugs had disappeared. When Grandpa and I went out in his weathered, pale blue metal boat for our daily check and maintenance, he brought another jug, assuming the water’s movement had simply worked the knot free on the missing one. As he reached for the trotline, he started tugging on it, first grunting and then laughing–we had a big something, he hollered. As he pulled along the trotline toward its downward angle, I watched him strain increasingly against it, and even as he groaned, he laughed again, simply tickled with the whole thing. There was a brief battle as his arms maneuvered to get a sure grip, and he leaned back and pulled. The largest fish I’d ever seen up close broke the water. I shouted something–who knows what–and flailed backwards onto my seat cushion, and my Grandpa laughed even harder. At some point I’m sure I fetched the net for him, and he hauled a 21-pound catfish into the boat, letting it slap down into the flat bottom of the boat with a great thud. Neither one of us could stop grinning.

Grandma had obviously been watching from the kitchen window that overlooked the dock and our trotline, because she was walking out with a camera when we pulled the boat back into its spot. We took a few pictures, all smiles. Grandma probably said, “Mercy!” a few times, and delivered her line, “You clean it, I’ll cook it.” Her catfish was always delicious, but that was easily my favorite dinner.

A couple days later, I walked into the kitchen first thing, and Grandpa was ready for me. No jug again, but this time, he was grinning, eyes shining. “What do you think? You wanna guess if it’s gone, or if we got another one like that?” Grandma gasped, “Could it be? Another one?” A minute later we were in the boat, Grandpa reaching for the line. “Yep!” he said, laughing. “It’s going straight down!” After even more of a struggle, he pulled it in, and this time, I was prepared to see that massive fish, like a slimy gray tongue, wriggle to the surface and flop as Grandpa dragged it over the side of the boat. At 23 pounds, it was our biggest the rest of the summer, and for me, any time since.

It was again a fun to-do, laughter and smiles, and a few photographs. And at this point in the trip, my parents and family had arrived to join us for a few days before we all headed back to Illinois together. While we were on the dock, my mom suggested we go back up to the house as Grandpa set to preparing his fish cleaning station, but I must have said something about wanting to stay on the dock this time–as with the others, but especially with this one, it felt like my fish we’d caught. And Grandpa and I, the fishermen, would be in when we were done. I remember my Mom hesitating, and then putting my arms around my shoulders and saying, “I just want to prepare you… Grandpa might do something a little unpleasant to the fish. He needs to put it out of its misery before he can clean it.” I nodded, not really understanding. She straightened up and stood next to me as we watched my grandfather, her dad, reach into the Igloo cooler where our mighty fish was waiting. With one large hand gripping the fish’s lower jaw, he swung it up over the sink counter and slammed it down quickly, immediately bringing his right hand through the air from the other side, thumping a ball peen hammer into the dead center of the catfish’s skull. I’m sure I jumped. The fish was instantly still. Everyone was quiet for just a breath, and the chatter resumed as Grandpa set down the hammer and reached for his filet knife.

Sobered, but interested, I walked over to the counter. He stayed focused on his task as I watched him slide the knife in and up, working the center open. “It was a momma,” he said, matter-of-factly. I thought he meant he could tell somehow it was a female, but then he pulled out a strings of roe. I realized right away what the milky pearls were, and I felt a little older, a little more mature–proud of myself, even, for neither delighting in harming an animal nor shying away from our corner of the ecosystem. To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, between the trotline and the dinner plate, there is complicity.

We got in the local paper for that one. Grandpa loved to tell the story, and I probably heard him retell it a dozen times throughout the rest of our visit as friends, neighbors, aunts, uncles, and cousins dropped in for visits over the next few days. His favorite part, and mine, was when he would imitate me shouting at the sight of that first big one popping out of the water. His face would break into exaggerated terror, as funny as Danny Kaye’s best, and shriek with flailing arms back against his chair, and then explode into fits of laughter until he had to wipe his eyes. It never got old for either one of us.

Learning to Write Songs as a Kid

So anyway, yeah, I wrote my first song on that trip–my first song on the guitar, my first song with words. 12-bar blues in A, with a turnaround between the verses. “The Fate of the Catfish” had four verses, sung from the perspective of an old catfish living at the bottom of the Lake of the Ozarks, who’d heard about this deadly duo and their terrible trotline. He’d heard that a big family was gathering, folks with hearty appetites who loved to eat catfish. In the final verse, resigned to his fate, he petitions, “So, Good Lord, please, can we make a date?” It was probably exactly what you’re imagining. (And like all projects in that house, it was written on a yellow legal pad.)

My family loved it, of course. Ah, those kudos. I soak up praise like a cat lying on a sun-warmed patch of hardwood floor, always have. We returned home, and I set to writing more songs. They came quickly and easily. There was no such thing as waiting to be inspired–I was always inspired. I’m not saying they were any good, but they were sincere. I was having fun, and I could sense they were getting better. You know how David Bowie would have his periods: the Ziggy Stardust thing, the Berlin years, and so on. I was having similar epochs, every five songs or so. I’d write a few songs, then suddenly write something that felt so much more artistic, more sophisticated, more poetic, that everything I’d written in the past four months was an embarrassment. It’s hard to build much of a repertoire that way, but I can’t really describe the hopes and dreams I felt billowing beneath me. I felt like my skills as a musician and songwriter were growing exponentially–and I’m sure they were at that early stage. Each new chord, each new technique, each new trick I learned made it into the next song.

With this time having passed, reflecting back on the years that followed and the countless songs that were written, shared, recorded, performed, and eventually discarded (honestly, it’s got to be in the hundreds), I was always proud of the fact that I could sit down and write a song on command. I believed in those songs. I almost said that I believed in them more than many of them deserved, but I don’t think I feel that way, actually. I’m not saying they were good, though I think several were solid for the time, place, and purpose. I’m saying I loved them.

You get knocked around a few times, passed over a few times, or just simply don’t get the same breaks some of your friends and acquaintances do, and it can be pretty easy to worry you’re not good enough to defend your desire to make art. To take a position or perspective through creative works, to give something life and breath and voice and intention and send it forward with your chin up, proud of it in spite of itself, in spite of your obvious shortcomings. It’s hard to simply love the thing when you’re bound up worrying if other people think you deserve to share that space with them. Enough of that, and pretty soon you can’t sit down and write a song whenever you want to anymore. They come a lot slower, if at all, and while they always start with the promise of new life, a very small few get to sprout and grow and stay, while most are either pruned back to nothing, turned back under, or dipped in bronze commemorating that one day you wrote a pretty good chorus, and you’ll do something with it at some point, probably maybe.

At this moment, I’m thinking the reason I don’t finish songs is because I’m afraid people aren’t going to love them like I do. I’m afraid of what people might infer about me, reading between the lines, making assumptions and associations, some of which would inevitably be true. I’m caught between wanting to be fully present in my creative work, fully immersed in my own process, beholden to the songs and stories and images within me that call out from wherever they call out from, requesting passage into this world… I’m caught between that and my tendency to protect the softest parts of me, the tender, pink creature underneath the hard exoskeleton of confidence, performance, and persona that I am sometimes all too aware gets significantly more daylight than the parts that most make me me.

It’s not that I don’t create things. I do write finished songs, and occasionally, I get through the process of recording one. Less often, I might even post one on the internet. But I notice it has to fit a certain criteria, beyond reaching whatever (arbitrary) standard of quality I think merits sharing it. It has to have the perception of authenticity–that is, it needs to be close enough to who I am that people who know me will think, “Yeah, that makes sense, coming from him.” Even if they’re surprised or impressed, if they didn’t know I was capable of making something like that, I’ve still never performed or published anything that challenged their perception of who I am. Not music, not fiction, not poetry, not art–nothing. I’ve had plenty of ideas, lots of notes and plans and outlines, and even the occasional bold declaration that I’ve landed “a big one.” But my sharp awareness of an external audience, of the validation or approval I think I need from them, has stopped me short of standing up for my own creations, thus depriving myself of the pride and joy of being their creator.

I really do want to be prolific–that’s probably the most authentic and accurate thing I said in the first session of writing this. I haven’t thought about how effortless writing (and finishing!) songs used to be for quite some time, and my heart is cracking open just a little bit right now. Or maybe it’s that the exoskeleton, opening up just a bit to let the light reach some exposed tender skin beneath. Either way, I remember it well. Not just that it happened, but the feeling of it. The fearlessness of it. The freedom of it. The personal– I can’t even put words to how secure it made me feel in my own… my own what? Identity? My self? My soul? My spirit? My place in the universe?

I want all that back, and I think I’m maybe finally ready and able to commit to not squandering it again.

Contributed by Harley Ferris

Image: “Catfish” by Plain Adventure (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)