Perfectionism – the enemy

I’m so happy to be back with my blog after a summer break. I’m kicking off with a whopper!

As Voltaire didn’t say, but is so often misquoted, ‘perfectionism is the enemy of good’. (He actually wrote down the Italian proverb il meglio è nemico del bene, which translates as ‘the best is the enemy of the good’. Close, but no cigar.)

Nevertheless, perfectionism is the enemy. It can paralyse you, so that you can’t even begin. Or, my topic here, it can prevent you from stopping, and declaring the job done.

I’m careful never to promise perfection in my editing. I’m human, so that’s never going to happen, anyway! Excellence, yes. Best endeavours, always. Perfection – run away, run away fast!

Sadly, ‘perfectionism’ alliterates with ‘proofreading’ so it’s tempting for people to include it in their business name or their straplines. You’ll notice that I trade as ‘Apt Words’, not ‘Perfect Words’. Whose definition of perfect, anyway? Yours? Mine? Some body’s that sits outside the world and pronounces on proper English? Your English teacher from twenty or forty or sixty years ago?

And that’s just editing (and proofreading)!

What about writing?

What about writing that’s being edited? Ah – there’s a gripe and a half.

Repeat after me:

I shall not keep revising after I’ve submitted the text for publication.

I shall not keep revising after I’ve submitted the text for publication.

I shall not keep revising after I’ve submitted the text for publication.

I shall not keep revising after I’ve submitted the text for publication.

I shall not keep revising after I’ve submitted…

I recently completed an edited collection in which we discovered that I’d been sent the wrong version of one of the chapters. I’d found rather a lot of missing references, and artwork that didn’t relate to the callouts in the text. In response, I get sent a version of the chapter with a new biblio and a jumbled collection of images, which, I gather, was meant to be the final-final-final version of the chapter, revised multiple times after it was sent to the volume editor. Turns out the author just didn’t know when to stop.

The upshot was that neither the author nor the volume editor was entirely sure which of many versions of the chapter was intended for publication – there was something of a failure, too, in file-naming. We muddled through somehow, and then the author asked to see the chapter again before typesetting – the book was already running a week late, and there was no way this request could be accommodated. There wasn’t even time for the author to reread the chapter, and you have to suspect that the author wouldn’t stop at merely rereading.

I certainly had no time to handle another set of revisions and meet the new deadline, nor could I summon up any enthusiasm for it. Publication of many people’s work cannot be delayed by one contributor who simply can’t bring themselves to think ‘Well, it’s good enough’ and finally let go.

Then there was the author who asked me, mid-copyedit, whether they could send a couple of small revisions. Being a reasonable editor, I said yes (I was within my rights to say no!), and duly received a couple of small revisions. However, the author had neglected to say that it was actually going to be a couple of small revisions to 95% of the pages.

Perfectionism – just a little tweak here, just a little tweak there, surely that’s no trouble? Well, it’s not impossible, but it’s frustrating to edit a moving target: everyone gets muddled, checks for consistency and formatting that you’ve already worked through need to be repeated.

Many editors work on a fixed-fee basis, especially when working for publishers, and an ill-disciplined author is literally (get over it, it’s been used hyperbolically for hundreds of years) putting their hand in the wallet of their editor and removing the cash.

But surely perfection is a worthy goal?

If we don’t strive for perfection, doesn’t that mean we’re settling for less, that standards will drop, that civilisation as we know it will disappear in some particularly unpleasant cataclysm?

No, it doesn’t.

If we don’t demand perfection, it’s because we realise it’s unrealistic. It stops things happening – anxiety rises, deadlines are missed. There’s a cost – human, emotional and, when someone is waiting too long for you to hand in your manuscript, a financial cost, too.

If you’re late, publication schedules have to be reworked, other people’s work may be delayed, additional costs for overtime and rush fees may be incurred. Or the publication date is not moved, and the people after you in the production schedule are squeezed. I still shake my head over a job I turned down a couple of years ago.

Could I copyedit a 350,000 word manuscript, including getting all the author queries answered and incorporated, in four weeks? No, there was no wiggle room in the timescale. And there was, for that job, not only no extra money for working double-length days for a month, discarding all my other commitments barring sleep: there was scarcely any money at all. The fee also had no wiggle room, and was always going to pan out at about £5 per hour (are you shocked? You should be), but now I was expected to have a miserable and exhausting and panicked four weeks for that fee.

This book came from a large, well-known academic publisher.

It was a very, very easy no. But why was the book running so late? People had been tweaking and fiddling and not wanting to let go and allow the book out into the world without just one more read through, or addition of this great new paper that had just come out, or making an addition or a cut, or changing a reference or whatever was going on in the author’s head as they strove for the unattainable. Because books take time to be edited, typeset, proofread and indexed, books can never be completely up-to-the-moment in terms of scholarship.

No, really – I want my writing to be perfect!

Read my lips: perfection for everyone is unachievable (except for the very occasional and very happy accident).

It’s unachievable because no one can agree on what it is in any particular circumstance.

Perfection is also unachievable because of human frailty. NB: that doesn’t mean relying on the Grammarlies, Hemingways, Word Editors and similar writing apps of this world. Those things will not steer you well in a large proportion of your text. They’ll help with a few things, sure. In my experience, they’re as likely to introduce errors as fix them.

For me, human frailty shows particularly in how I see biblios arrive. Some are cobbled together with no attempt to reflect a single style, let alone the prescribed one. In others, you can see how someone has really tried hard to meet the style.

In one recent book, I had a beautifully styled biblio. You could see that the author had worked on it with attention to the publisher’s style guide. Hurrah! Two problems, however.

1. They’d tried to do everything by eye, so hadn’t found italic commas and full stops, nor double spaces, nor hyphens instead of en rules in some of the number ranges and all the kind of things a copyeditor goes searching for those, rather than fixing the ones they happen to notice.
2. They’d followed the wrong section of the style guide, and I had to change every single reference, which was heartbreaking, considering the effort the author had put in.

I bet that author had been as pleased as Punch with the outcome of their labours – ‘Perfect!’, they may well have been thinking. Completely wrong, I was thinking.

Then what, if not perfection?

Be good enough.

That’s all. And it’s actually quite a lot.

It means that we strive to do our best in the circumstances. I know of no one who has unlimited resources of time, of money, of ideas, of concentration, of emotional energy – nor of word count!

Trying to produce a manuscript that looks like you have had no limits when you most certainly do is a fool’s errand.

This isn’t settling for second best. It’s understanding the world around you, and realising it applies to you, too.

It doesn’t mean throwing any old rubbish together and calling it good.

It does mean meeting the brief. Fully.

It means writing up your research to the best of your current ability and, importantly, delivering what was asked for, on time.

What you’re writing now will never be the last word on the topic. You’re contributing to an ever-flowing stream of ideas and learning. There are always new articles to write, second editions of books, new books to propose.

The good-enough editor

As a copyeditor, all I can ever be is good enough. As my efforts are constrained by time and money budgets, I’ll do the best I can with what I have. My goal is excellence within those constraints – not perfection.

I use computer tools judiciously to help my all-too-human brain – consistency checkers found a word that was hyphenated on p 10 and closed up on p 475 of my last job. It all helps to close the gap, but for all I know I might chase down an extra potential change or two if only I had the time to read through the whole book again, once I’d edited it, looking for the last little tweaks. I never have that time.

The typesetter is waiting to start that job when scheduled – failing to meet that schedule has knock-on effects. I have to make my edit as good as I can by the deadline, and then let go. Send the files, and move on to the next thing.