Done is better than good

This line comes from Elizabeth Gilbert's brilliant book 'Big Magic', which I've turned to for inspiration yet again this week.

She's talking about finishing a piece of writing, and apparently 'done is better than good' was one of her mother's favourite sayings.  W hat she means by it is that we need to power through the barrier of perfection and just do things.

This put me in mind of Ray Bradbury's advice to write a story a week.  His logic was that you couldn't write 52 bad stories in a row.  He believed that some of them were sure to have nuggets of gold.

But finishing the ones that aren't gold dust adds to our writing practice, and in a way it adds to our confidence in our writing too.  If we want to write a novel some day, if we've had the experience of writing a story a week for a year behind us it helps us believe that we can finish the novel. I've heard other writers suggest thinking of the novel as a series of linked short stories.  Their reasoning is that this mental trick reduces the enormity we might feel when tackling a huge manuscript.

What I've discovered from writing my one new story a week is that some are clearly good ideas, and some... Well, I'm still wondering where the disparate series of events that I've strung together on the page came from.

Those tend to be the stories where I've taken a one-sentence idea and turned it into a story.  And sometimes that's been a struggle.  Especially on the ones where I've no idea what's coming next.  The best stories are the ones where the initial idea is followed by the answers to a series of 'what ifs'.  That's an idea being turned into a story, being given a body, and having its theme discovered.  When  I'm writing from one of those outlines I never have trouble finding - or reaching - the end,

But it's the vague ideas, the scraps of paper with one or two lines on them, that cause the most trouble.  They have to be pulled from the ether word by word, their meaning discovered like a sculptor chipping a form out of a block of stone.

But I'll continue to finish these stories because, as Elizabeth Gilbert says, done is better than good.  And often when I have, the result is better than I thought, and well worth the effort.