One of the many excellent ideas and encouragements that Amie McNee suggests in her fantastic book is to get comfortable with the idea that a creative work that’s 80% as good as you’d like it to be is good enough.
Beyond that threshold, she says, you’re just making small changes, ones that probably aren’t worth the time invested for the slight improvement they may make. Worse still, your efforts in trying get it better may actually make it worse, second guessing your initial instincts as the work was originally made.
She underscores that she’s not suggesting that you, for instance, only finish the first draft of a writing project and just call it done, but that the pursuit of perfection is a fool’s game because there’s no such thing in art, which is by its very nature subjective.
Letting your creative projects go at that point also takes the burden of undue stress off artists who may otherwise struggle indefinitely for their work to be ideal. Instead, McNee says, as long as it’s 80% of the way there, publish it or put it aside with the other paintings for an upcoming show or put it out online or whatever you do share your creative work (McNee is also big on sharing your art with the world, a call to action also shared in a big way with Austin Kleon).
Above and beyond trying to apply that to my own work, as I will be with a writing project I’m noodling on, I had gone into Blaugust hoping to hit more of that 80% mark before being okay with letting these posts get sent into the wild. I’m still not there, by a long shot. But you’ve gotta have goals.
I’ll start with a cursory pass over this post and send it out.
Gotta start somewhere.