Don't Do Your Best
Don’t Do Your Best
Karen Stiller
When I was a girl, I sat for one long morning at an outdoor market behind a table full of earrings made from bright, plastic buttons. I don’t know how I came up with this idea, or why I thought it was a good one, but I glued earring backs to dozens of sets of buttons and one Saturday my father drove me to the Sackville flea market. I don’t remember if I sold even a single set, but I do remember I retired from jewellery making that very day, just past noon.
Humbled? Certainly. Deterred? Not at all. I bumbled my way from one craft to another for years, searching for instant excellence, fame and fortune.
I dabbled in salt-clay Christmas ornaments, with seashells I crushed with my mother’s rolling pin, as an innovation. I enrolled in a stained glass-making course with my handsome father who was the only man in class, with whom I watched mothers goofily flirt. I wasn’t a cut-things-in a-straight-line kind-of artist, that was clear. I moved on and moved to Vancouver. There, I abandoned soap-making, quickly, when I learned what lye feels like bubbling away on the soft flesh of the inner arm. Papermaking was wet and wonderful, but my lumpy sheets looked nothing like the fine linen stationary sold in the Granville Market store that hosted the class. After not trying very hard with that either, I moved along.
Sometime around then I stumbled on a magazine for “Canadian crafters” in a hobby store I wandered through, searching for my next big thing. I had been writing for a few years by then, short pieces for small papers in tiny places, which I think is how writers should start—growing good, slowly. I wove the threads of my misadventures together into a piece called “Confessions of a Failed Crafter,” and I made it onto the cover.
“Goodbye Crafting!” I said, and maybe forever, but I didn’t know that yet for sure. “Bon voyage!” Crafting yelled back and slammed the door behind me. In writing, I discovered my clay, my paints, and my mandolin. Writing would be my art and my craft.
*
“Sarah will boil our heads like cabbages,” said Bonne, my editor, when I sent in another round of tweaks as my manuscript wrapped itself up.
Each time another set of almost-final proofs landed in my inbox, dread filled me. How long could I put off opening these email attachments? How weak would these pages be, lying before me on their stretcher?
Finally, I would convince myself to do the work one more time, every single word of the work, over and over, and only then I could go out for candy or coffee.
Not once did I add more weight to those pages. I substituted or subtracted only. Near the end, revision is almost always removal. I spotted the weeds. I dug down to the bottom of their roots, yanked, and smoothed the churned soil flat once again with the palm of my hand. I pulled and patted over and over and over, not until it was the best it could be, but until Bonne wrote back and said, “It’s too late. Sorry. The files are at the printer.”
I cleaned the dirt out from under my fingernails and washed my hands of it then, drying them off on a soft towel. A few weeks later I flew to Chicago—one of the last batches of Canadians to do that for a while—to record the audio version of my book.
I finally met up with the physical copy of my book when a publicist handed me an early review copy, and I discovered that I liked her. “You look great,” I whispered into her ear.
I sat behind a wall in a make-shift sound booth, reading. One engineer turned dials and lowered levers, and the other read silently along with me. He was the police, ensuring I didn’t alter a jot or a tittle. I delivered a bottle of maple syrup to Sarah, to say sorry and thank you, because maple syrup does both.
As I read out loud to two complete strangers over three complete days, there were still words I would have changed–they embarrass me to this day–but I relaxed and grew to believe that this was good work done well. I didn’t trust it was my best, but I trusted the process I used to make it.
*
It was mothering that saved me from the idea of doing my best, which is not exactly the same as perfectionism, but they are sisters wearing matching dresses. An hour or two into mothering, I knew it wouldn’t always be pretty. On some days, good enough and “We are all now in bed” was a victory. We could begin again in the morning. I would learn to trust this process too, of loving and growing people despite not really knowing what I was doing.
As our three children became adults, so beautiful and complicated, my memories of the things I had done and the things I had left undone sometimes showed up, and demanded to be let in. It’s hard to get memories out of the living room once they decide to take a seat. Every honest parent tangles with regrets. I know there are those who can briskly say: “Well Chloe, I did my best.” I cannot honestly say I always did my best, as much as I would love to think that was even possible.
When I hear it, “I did my best,” sounds like an excuse. When I say it, “I did my best” sounds like a weak apology. What we need to do in parenting and in writing–instead of our impossible best–is to do our work over and over again, and don’t you dare give up. There will be sorrow and success and it’s all a big stew on the stove. Forget about the best, in home and in art. Set that burden down, right at your weird-looking feet. Show up and try hard. That’s how we help nurture people and poems. Trust the process more and trust our best less.
*
This is very Anglican of us, this idea that process matters more than performance—that the way we make something has an important weight and is worthy of our trust. That when we do the same thing over and over again, we are training ourselves, and when a long time has passed, we find we will be better.
When we step into church and offer our sad and suspicious selves into the sacred sentences of worship, this is a deep relinquishment of trying to be our best. To trust the process in writing, or artmaking of any kind I am sure, is to believe in a liturgy of making that is true no matter how we feel on that day, it is scaffolding to scramble up to reach the higher places.
Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey provides a glimpse into the creative working lives of 161 artists of all kinds, and the “daily rituals to get done the work they love to do.” My beloved short-story artist Alice Munro wrote, at the beginning at least, during her children’s nap times, and then later when they were in school. Thomas Mann was always in his study by 9:00 am, where he wrote undisturbed until noon. My favorite might be Choreographer George Balanchine, who planned and created while he ironed his clothing, almost daily. Ironing was a part of his process. He trusted the ironing. All the processes were different and fine-tuned and hard earned. These highly creative and accomplished writers, artists, musicians and super-smart math people all discovered how to do good work well within the possibilities of their own lives. And then, they hit repeat (and tweaked occasionally, of course).
The process I trust is read, think, outline, walk, read, walk, despair, write, regret, write, leave in a warm place to let rise, and then revise again and again and again (as many times as time allows until I believe it is good enough. Revision is everything.), finish, send, be weird and go into sent folder to read email, see ridiculous error, email editor again almost immediately.
This process works for me, again and again. I know it and I trust it, although there are parts of it that I always hate. If I don’t abandon process, I know that when I start at read, I will finish at emailing my editor twice in a row. I believe in this.
At the heart of our best work is not doing our best at all. It is showing up and working the process like my dog with his bone in our tiny backyard. Someday, at the end of our wild and creative lives when we hug our people goodbye and we have set down our paint and our pens for this time and place, maybe then there will be something beautiful we hold in our hands and say, “This is the best I did.” I will wait.
Karen Stiller
Writer & Editor
Karen is the author of The Minister’s Wife: a memoir of faith, doubt, friendship, loneliness, forgiveness and more. www.karenstiller.com
Photography by Mathilde Langevin
