Perfection

Last week I talked about the interplay between hype and perfection. I said “I worry that as writers we sometimes hype our own very good ideas up in our minds so that when we start writing the work never lives up to the internal hype we’ve given the idea!” In other words, the work we produce isn’t as perfect as we’d thought it would be when we started.

Of course, no work is ever perfect. Plato talked about how a chair, no matter how beautifully constructed, is never perfect. He said it never compares to the perfect ‘chairness’ if you will, in the sky. His point being the idea of the perfect chair could never be fully realized with the tools and materials we have to work with in our Earth-bound existence.

Early in my career—I had written just two screenplays at that point—I had lunch with the great producer David Heyman. This was long before he produced the Harry Potter movies. He’s an incredibly smart guy and he was full of wisdom. But one thing he said I just didn’t buy, “Not everything you write will be perfect, you know.”

He said this having read my two film scripts—both of which he liked very much or believe me, my agents wouldn’t have had any luck getting him to have lunch with me! So I just didn’t see how he could say that. Was there something in one of the scripts he hadn’t liked and he was just too polite to say so? I just didn’t get it.

It took years before I got it.

When I was just starting 20 years ago, I couldn’t imagine writing anything that wasn’t wonderful. After all, I wouldn’t show it to anyone until I had gone over and over it and made sure it was really good. I mean, hadn’t I just written two amazing screenplays? Why would he think that wouldn’t continue? Did he see some flaw in my character or something?

I don’t recall saying much about that comment at the time—although knowing me, I probably argued with him and said I planned only to write good stuff or something inane. But as time has gone by I know how right he was.

Writing means failing. Always. With a scene, with the creation of a character, with a line of dialogue, with a whole script. When a woodworker begins their career, they begin by being an apprentice to a master woodworker—so that they can learn the craft. They practice and study as they work. And it’s only after lots of practice, lots of work, that they perfect their craft.

Art very often needs time. Time to learn, grow, fully mature. And for a writer, that’s true of everything you write. You can have been writing for a decade and still write a lousy script. Nobody’s perfect.

I was on a screenwriting panel once with Michael Arndt [Little Miss Sunshine, Toy Story 3, Star Wars: The Force Awakens] who talked about his success after winning the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Little Miss Sunshine. Before that screenplay took off, he’d written 9 others. His agents said, “let us see ‘em—we can sell them all.” And to Arndt’s credit he didn’t—knowing that he wasn’t a good enough writer when he wrote those and his work going forward would be better.

So realize that you may have to go through years of writing less than perfect scripts before you get to the point of producing one that’s good enough to sell. I found out David Heyman was right—not everything I write will be perfect, and I can live with that, but it doesn’t stop me, each time, from aiming for that perfection!

Copyright © Diane Lake

21May17

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