Perfect

Welcome to the Spot Writers! This month’s prompt is “He (she/they) started the new year with…” Today’s prompt comes to us from Val Muller, author of the kidlit mystery series Corgi Capers.

Perfect

by Val Muller

She started the new year with a pen in hand. Perfection was the enemy of progress. She’d read so many variations of that quote lately, it was like the universe was talking directly to her.

The blank page in her new sketchbook stared back at her. Yes, a sketchbook instead of a journal. There would be no lines, no rules. Just progress.

She wrote a sentence, a line that struck her. It had been with her for a few months now, coming and going, and with it a vague idea for a new story. For now, it was just a line. She’d read that a single line is how J. R. R. Tolkien started his masterpiece The Hobbit. Just a line.

And look where that led him.

She didn’t know what to write next, so she copied the line over again, in cursive this time. Then again in a bubbly font. The letters looked perfect.

No.

How did Tolkien go from a single line to an epic adventure? Certainly not by copying a sentence. An illustration, perhaps.

The line had to do with flight. What could she draw? Something about freedom. A cloud. Pathetic. What else? How do you draw blue sky? How to draw freedom?

All the familiar fears came. The internal and eternal editor, her own worst critic. How could she silence it?

This is how the past year had gone—the start of something, then that something killed by an internal editor. This could not go on. She was going to draw a bird. It was decided. It was going to be the worst bird she ever drew, but it would help her. A bird was like freedom, right? She just didn’t know where to start. The body? The wing? She almost reached for her phone, for a tutorial to show her how to do it the right way.

But no.

This year was about imperfection.

Just draw.

She took a deep breath. Closed her eyes. Drew the arc of the wing. Felt its body curve as she drew blindly on the page. She thought about the story arc, the character’s drive to be free. The story flowed into her subconscious as she tried to feel her way back from the body to the second wing.

She opened her eyes.

It was the worst drawing of a bird she had ever seen.

And it was perfect.

The Spot Writers—Our Members:

Val Muller: http://www.valmuller.com/blog/ 

Catherine A. MacKenzie: https://writingwicket.wordpress.com/wicker-chitter/ 

Phil Yeats: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com 

Chiara De Giorgi: https://chiaradegiorgi.blogspot.ca/