It’ll never be perfect

I started doing a final proofread of one of my scripts, one that I’m planning to publish and release in the next couple months. It’s a script I’ve rewritten and polished several times already, and my beta readers tell me it’s a great script. But now that I’m doing my final proofread, I’m finding a million things I want to change — many of them much bigger than fixing typos.

I think this is probably a thing that all writers and artists and musicians deal with: accepting that it’ll never be perfect. There’s always more that could be done, things that could be changed.

At the same time, I hate the idea of “good enough.” On principal, I don’t think striving for “good enough” is a virtue. When I graduated from John Paul the Great Catholic University, our faculty speaker put it this way: “Mediocrity does not give glory to God.” In all things, we should be doing our absolute best. We give a better Christian witness when we work hard and strive for excellence in our ordinary occupations.

So on the one hand, I know it’ll never be perfect. On the other hand, if I know it can be improved, I feel a kind of moral obligation to improve it. How do I find the balance?

I think the answer lies somewhere in the virtue of humility, which is unfortunate because it’s a virtue I’m terrible at. I’m constantly finding pride and vanity lurking beneath my choices and motivations. I don’t want anyone to strip away my carefully constructed facade and find out that I’m really not a great writer, that I do most things imperfectly, and that I have a serious tendency toward laziness and cutting corners. Even the first sentence of this paragraph demonstrates both my pride and my vanity: I really want to change it because I know ending with a preposition is grammatically improper and I like being perfect (pride), but I don’t want to change it because I think the alternative will make me sound pretentious (vanity).

Lord, help me to accept my own weaknesses and yet honor you with my work. Amen.