Let’s face it: no one will ever be perfect, but at the end of the day isn’t that the beauty of writing? Once we accept our flaws we can learn from them and then grow. This holds especially true in writing where your first draft can look astronomically different than your final draft. For example, even this article is imperfect, but that is what makes you want to read, right? The small imperfections that I leave make the article unique and make it so even if you do not know who the author is personally you can look at a few of their articles and say the author is the same, due to recognizing their imperfections. Just like how you can recognize an artist from their art style, or a musician by the way they play.

If you ask writers about the topic of perfection some of them might say something along the lines of, “perfect is boring, flaws are good,” while others will say, “you should make the article as close to perfection as possible,” but I think the best way to describe imperfections is with this quote from someone who isn’t even a writer, “if you try to fix imperfections before finishing your draft, you will never finish anything,” and while some will disagree with the message most will wholeheartedly agree. If you are on your first draft of an article and you try to fix it before the editing process, you will spend more time editing then writing. Even if the article is not perfect for you, others may disagree and love the article, so you get a friend to read the article, then that friend recommends the article to his friend and soon so many people will know about your article.

Imperfection isn’t just prevalent in writing, artists also are very imperfect whether that be a stray line or just not being able to draw a circle. There is a big difference though since unlike writers, most artists don’t make drafts of their art, the closest they have to a draft is an outline or a storyboard and this made me think. What about musicians? I mean they have to have some kind of draft system right? So I looked it up and the fact is that they do, which confused me even more on the question of who drafts and who does not. But then I found a man named Sam Phillips and he thought that perfection was, “the devil” and I thought it was somewhat right, but the more I thought about it the more I thought that he was correct, I mean if you always want perfection you will never really get anywhere because you will be too caught up in editing you won’t be able to do anything with actual writing.

Even though every article is imperfect and all novels are written with mistakes and flaws doesn’t that make it more engaging? I mean if everything was perfect all of the time life would be a boring dystopia. Since everything is imperfect that is why we like it, because the flaws make it unique and sometimes can make the article or novel better. Whether the mistake is a comma being in the place of a period or an entire paragraph needing a rework. Everything is going to be imperfect and riddled with flaws no matter what, and that is the way we love it.