Leaving the imperfections in.

One thing I enjoy about this month-long writing challenge is that I can release myself from the pressure of delivering a perfect finished product. By setting myself a hard deadline of writing and publishing something every day, there can be no long refinement phase, no ruthless edit where I agonise over what makes the cut. I generally give pieces a quick pass over, changing the odd word here and there, fixing grammatical errors (there are probably still plenty I miss), but they are more or less published just as they are, in all their raw messiness. I’ve also set myself a rule that once a piece is published, I can’t go back and tinker with it, save to fix spelling mistakes and typos. It’s liberating to know that once a piece is out in the world, I can draw a line under it and move on. It can be frustrating too — sometimes I later think of ways to elaborate on what I’ve written, or things I could have said differently. But these are all lessons I can pour into the next day’s writing, a fresh blank page, another chance to express myself. I like to think that my writing will gradually improve over the course of the month as those lessons are absorbed and become part of me.

That’s incidental really, though. Letting go of the idea of perfection gives me the chance to write and think freely, without consequences. Each piece of writing is not here to be judged or fussed over. It doesn’t matter if no one reads what I write, or if it doesn’t chime with them. The important thing is I’m expressing something within myself.

This extends to illustrations too. I’m enjoying the lack of control that comes from using brushes and ink, loosely making marks on the paper. At the same time, by using only brushes and black ink, I’m freeing myself from decision paralysis. The illustrations that accompany some of these pieces of writing aren’t designed to sum them up perfectly, but to be an extension of the writing, to further express what’s in my head. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t make perfect sense to the reader, but I like to think it connects on some level because it is raw and unfiltered. The illustration at the start of this piece wasn’t even meant to be here. It was just me making marks on the paper, getting used to the feel of the brush. I drew another version afterwards, but it didn’t express the feel of the moment: it was too perfect, too designed, and so I discarded it.

I wish I could tell my younger self to worry less about perfection. In the past I have approached creative expression far too timidly. Partly this is the wisdom of hindsight, but I’m sure my own embrace of imperfection is also partly a reaction against the eerie polish of generative AI slop. I used to do a lot of digital illustration, but now that feels too perfect, too machine-made, too far removed from self-expression. Writing too is flattened, smoothed out, made too perfect by gen-AI. It doesn’t tell you anything about the person that created it because, of course, there is no person (other than the creators of all the stolen training data, who are erased from the output). There is nothing to read between the lines. These days I would much rather see the hand of the artist in any work of art, not just despite its imperfections but because of them. Imperfect is human.