that lacks passion and spontaneity. “Do not fear mistakes,”
Miles Davis told us. “There are none.”
Cerebration is the enemy of originality in art.
MARTIN RITTThe perfectionist fixes one line of a poem over and over
—until no lines are right. The perfectionist redraws the chin
line on a portrait until the paper tears. The perfectionist
writes so many versions of scene one that she never gets to
the rest of the play. The perfectionist writes, paints, creates
with one eye on her audience. Instead of enjoying the
process, the perfectionist is constantly grading the results.
The perfectionist has married the logic side of the brain.
The critic reigns supreme in the perfectionist’s creative
household. A brilliant descriptive prose passage is critiqued
with a white-glove approach: “Mmm. What about this
comma? Is this how you spell ... ?”
For the perfectionist, there are no first drafts, rough
sketches, warm-up exercises. Every draft is meant to be
final, perfect, set in stone.
Midway through a project, the perfectionist decides to
read it all over, outline it, see where it’s going.
And where is it going? Nowhere, very fast.
The perfectionist is never satisfied. The perfectionist
never says, “This is pretty good. I think I’ll just keep