The Quest to Perfection.

Hello, dear reader! Can you believe the picture that I just found on Google? It just spoke to me!

Confession: When I was a teenager I wanted to be that uncle. The perfect cook, an expert in every dish invented on this planet. That was of course before Master Chef, Hell's Kitchen and Iron Chef. I wouldn't last a minute in any of these shows and as a testament to that I completely forgot to add salt in tonight's dinner (sorry famjam!).

Anyways, today I wanted to dabble a little bit about the concept of perfection. It all started when I was about to sit down and create my masterpiece. Of course, like every good author, I had imagined every possible scenario of my glamorous life as a successful author before getting a single word down. After planning out my book tour I decided to use Google for something a little more productive.

According to Google, dear reader, a good novel must have a gripping  beginning. This will trap the reader into your world and force them to stay glued to the words that you have woven together. I'm talking eating with one hand and reading with the other or reading under the blanket with a torch hoping to God that your parents don't catch you (all of which I have done, nerd alert).

The minute I read this writing tidbit I knew I had to come up with a brilliant beginning! A beginning so good that you wanted to read it over and over and over! So, I sat there and started writing out my first line.

It was ridiculously hard. I have never written stupider sentences in my life. I'll give you an example, "The light turned on and then off."

Yeah. I know.

After 3 hours of sentences that became weirder and weirder, I was certain that there was no such thing as a good beginning.

And so I Googled, again. This time typing the words, "the world's most epic novel beginning" into the search engine.

Do you know what happened, dear reader? I found the beginning of all beginnings.

I can never forget those 9 words. They are forever embedded in my brain because of their brilliance.

"Even the October sky wore black to her funeral."

I know, right?

Mind blown.

How can anyone measure up to that? How does someone achieve that level of perfection? It's impossible.

So, I cried for 3 hours and told myself that becoming an author wasn't me. There was no way I could put together words to create brilliance like that.

I gave up.

I went back to living my life, doing everything just the way I had done it before. Nothing changed.

And then one day, I was sitting on my bed, bored, and I opened up a blank document and began typing.

I didn't read what I wrote, I didn't worry about the flow of the words and I certainly didn't Google anything.

An hour later, I had 800 words on the page and when I read them, dear reader, they sounded good. I liked what I had created. I don't know what to call my writing or how people would react to it but I realized that I didn't care.

Me, right now, writing this blog, defines me. When I write I am in a different world, a world where time and responsibilities don't exist and I like being there. I am transported in this beautiful world of words and sentences and I don't want to leave.

My novel is not perfection (yeah, right!) but it is mine. I will choose the measurement of my success, of my words, and of my creation.

Not anyone else. Once you've got that down, dear reader, you tend to surprise yourself and, to me, is worth more than perfection.

isheeza