perfection

I’ve been viewing reddit (a more intelligent Fukung and easier to navigate than 4Chan) a lot and came across a fun read that explained why George R. R Martin takes so long to write each Game of Thrones book. I was unable to locate the link, which blows my mind, but the point behind it was that he perfects every little detail. Say he writes a chapter and it moves in the editing process – 90% is unusable, 6% is good, 3% is wonderful, and 1% is gold. He then goes back and continues this process until he produces what is becomes the most popular fantasy books of our time. This technique isn’t rocket science but I doubt many of us do it.

Another example, “Despite the polished and complex nature of the Aeneid, legend stating that Virgil wrote only three lines of the poem each day.” It took 10 years to write and had 10,000 words. I compare stories like this to my work and it’s laughable. Most of the time I’m so hurried to publish the post that I don’t even bother to proof read it. Of course this isn’t ideal but when I weigh not posting for 6 months until I produce something of value compared to cranking out as many entries as I can hoping to strike gold, it’s not much of a thought. Even if I spent an inordinate amount of time of every post, it wouldn’t blow up the way I’d expect. Here are a few things I can do to make my blog posts better:

  • Well thought out original pictures with each post
  • Using a thesaurus to make each part of speech the perfect description
  • Not being quick to publish entries and taking ideas and formulating quality posts
  • Make sure keywords, hyperlinks, and titles are all included and well thought out
  • All spacing makes blog visually appealing

This concept obviously translates over to more than just writing. It’s everything you do and how meticulous you are in perfection. I remember Seinfeld saying that he would try out 20 different words and say them all differently to make his jokes hit the punchline expertly. This is the difference between pros and amateurs. Until this switch gets flipped, mediocrity ensues. It’s easy to get tired of something or better put, hard to know when it’s actually “perfect”. Take this post, I spent more time than I usually do but I’m not going to keep in my queue for another 3 days researching more examples and come up with better support to it. It just is what it is.