In her 1999 book Words Fail Me, itself an admission of imperfection, O'Conner reminds readers that even the greatest writers in their greatest books fall short of the ideal.
• Anthony Trollope has too many lengthy digressions in his novels.
• Antonia Fraser's The Wives of Henry VIII "has too damn many dashes."
• Herman Melville "introduces interesting characters, only to drop them," in Moby-Dick.
• The plot of Emily Bronte's masterpiece Wuthering Heights "is ridiculously improbable."
One could, of course, discover similar flaws in every book ever written. Error, like beauty, often lies in the eye of the beholder. Some of us may enjoy Trollope's digressions or not mind Fraser's dashes in the least. Still there is probably something about these books and others that bothers us. They are too long. They don't move along quickly enough. There's a typo on page 198. We are annoyed by different things, but any annoyance suggests imperfection. You just can't please everyone.
Why is this good advice? We could never leave our home if we feared the wind might mess up our hair. We could never open our mouth if we feared saying the wrong thing. We could never eat anything if we thought everything might be bad for us.
And for writers it means they will never get anything published if they never declare their work finished and stop looking for ways to improve it. There's probably something in this blog post I will later regret, but I am going to post it anyway.
Nobody's perfect.
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