Home For Fiction – Blog

for thinking people

perception

How Writing Perfectionism Kills Creativity

December 21, 2020

Writing

experience, perception, perfectionism, writing

I’m not really a perfectionist. I’m a jack of all trades and master of some, but I don’t care about perfection. In some sense, I consider it a part of the artistic process for a work to have imperfections – we’ll get back to this, it’s crucial. And so, writing perfectionism is something I reject.

But it wasn’t always like that.

I used to spend hours on a single paragraph; whole nights on trying to figure out – in vain – what the perfect chapter would look like.

But then years passed, life happened, and I became more experienced. I also became more skillful, to be sure, but realizing the harms of writing perfectionism is about experience, not skill.

In this post I’ll try to offer some of this experience and show you how writing perfectionism kills your creativity and harms your work. To be a perfectionist writer is to assign quantitative aspects to an inherently qualitative endeavor. Or, in plain English, a perfect answer can only exist for questions like “How much is 5+5?” and not for “Should my antagonist be more subtle?”

Writing as art involves affect, not perfection. In other words, it’s precisely imperfection that gives meaning, affect, and ultimately value to the work.

writing perfectionism
Writing perfectionism is harmful because it assigns quantitative aspects to an inherently qualitative endeavor
(more…)

“More than a Sum” – Short Story

March 25, 2019

Fiction

consciousness, dream, fiction, Kafka, perception, short story, symbolic

The text that follows, “More than a Sum”, is a short story I wrote after a particularly vivid dream. Many great stories begin this way, so my advice to fellow authors is to note down such dreams as soon as they wake up.

The story might remind you – at least in terms of style – of another short story published here. I think “More than a Sum” is less Kafkaesque than that one, but I do detect some similar topical traces.

more than a sum
(more…)

Superstitious People and the Meaning of Life

January 24, 2018

Philosophy

causality, ignorance, luck, meaning, perception, superstition

The title (“Superstitious People and the Meaning of Life”) might come off as hopelessly pompous. Let me assure you that you will not find answers about the meaning of life in this article 😛

First of all, let’s start with the basics: what do we mean by superstitious people? And then we will have to deal with the crux of the matter: why are there superstitious people?

A superstitious person is one who perceives a connection that is non-causal between two events. In simpler terms, a superstition is the belief that event A causes event B, although there is no apparent link between them.

For example, an evident causal connection (a causal link, in other words) is that between accidentally dropping a glass of water, then seeing the floor wet and full of glass shards. Your dropping the glass (event A) has caused the state of the floor (event B). Sometimes a causal link can be more complex, such as in the linkage between thunder and rain. There can be thunder without rain, as there can be rain without thunder. But if there is thunder followed by rain, there is an obvious connection between the two events.

superstitious people
Me? Unlucky? Get outta here!
(more…)