So much advice, so little achieved… Writing, as we all know, is a lonely task, and it is also, unfortunately, a task never completed. I was very struck by a remark made by Andrew Taylor in the interview with him which I posted here last week, in which he said, “You never write a book, you can only re-write it.” He was referring to the leap forward which, for him, takes place between the first and second drafts.
To steal an analogy from spinning and weaving (occupations I sporadically undertake when hiding from writing), you start off from a confusion of hanks of wool which needs to be spun into yarn, then the yarn needs to be woven, line by line, into cloth, and then, and only then, can the cloth be made into clothing, or a cushion cover, or a wall hanging. So the story starts out raw and muddled, and needs to go through a series of processes, tightening a thread here, untangling a knot there, until you can lay the whole thing out and see the pattern. Of course, in storytelling as in weaving, there are always going to be wiggly bits where you tried too hard, or a loose bit you couldn’t quite see how to fix, so you tuck it in and hope no-one will notice…
But, of course, in a saying I’ve seen attributed to Goethe, or to Cézanne, or to Charles De Gaulle (a pretty heterogeneous triad) - “genius is knowing when to stop”. So, muttering platitudes such as ‘Let not the perfect be the enemy of the good’, you finally decide (probably somewhere between your editor’s third and fourth exasperated email) that you’ve done what you could and you have to write THE END and let it go.
And that’s where I find Herrick’s In Praise of Disorder such a help:
A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness;
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction;
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher;
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribands to flow confusedly;
A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat;
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility:
Do more bewitch me, than when art
Is too precise in every part.
The highly seductive idea that some disorder, some lack of finish, is so much more captivating than an ‘art [which is] too precise in every part’.
Far from sure it’s true, but I’m more than happy to fly under those colours…
Such a great poem, which I'd forgotten about and so skilfully applied to your argument!