Manuscript As A House.

My wife and I bought a house that is over a hundred years old. Of course, it needs a lot of work which is one of the reasons we bought it.  Restoring the house is a lot of fun as well as a lot of work.  My Dad came out to Wisconsin this week to help me with some of the bigger projects.  The basic structure of the house is sound, but there are a lot of cosmetic problems that need to be dealt with.  This is very much like editing the first draft of a manuscript which is where I am with The Hemingway Thief right now. Obviously the metaphor of my manuscript as my house has been rolling around in my mind this week (not to be confused with that Kevin Kline movie in which the young Darth Vader plays a whiny goth male prostitute).
One of the projects was to reverse the way our basement door swings.  The door is located in the tight passageway between my kitchen and the front hall.  Last month I was passing by my wife in this passage and lost my balance.  The door had not been shut all the way and when I reached out to steady myself it opened up and I almost tumbled into the gaping maw of the basement stairway.  Luckily my wife was there to grab my arm before I broke my neck.  When I imagined what might have happened if it had been this coming Autumn, when I would most likely have a baby in my arms, I decided it would be best to have the door swing in than out.  Dad and I got to work on it immediately.
We had the hinges reversed and carved out the doorjamb when our very handy friend came over to offer some advice.  He took off all of the woodwork (which was cracked, dirty, and faded) and we spent the next two days stripping the wood, staining it, and glueing the broken pieces.  By the end the door and frame looked brand new and professionally installed.  My father commented, "I would have been fine with just hanging the door, but this looks great."
So, what does that have to do with The Hemingway Thief? Right now I have a pretty good story about three guys searching for Hemingway's lost suitcase in the Sierra Madres.  The characters are funny and the action works.  If I were to go back over it for spelling and grammar mistakes it would be just fine, Just like hanging the door without fixing the surrounding wood would have been good enough.  And while I would be perfectly happy passing the unfinished door each day or showing the story to friends and family neither would be fit for popular consumption.  I still need to strip away the dirt and seemlessly glue the pieces together.  While this will certainly take me longer it is the difference between getting the job done and getting the job done professionally.  If you'll remember my post about treating writing as your profession you'll know which side I come down on.
Still, there are times when good enough is good enough.  Sometimes the imperfections are the best parts. Our handy friend pointed out that the coloring of the wood was called its patina and the best patina's are in old wood that had taken some abuse.  "It gives it character," he said.
The same is true for art.  We all know the damage George Lucas did when he went back to perfect his "flawed" Star Wars trilogy.  The little parts he didn't get quite right the first time had turned out to be what fans loved best about it.  Then there is the famous story of the shark in Jaws.  Spielberg had originally intended to show the shark in the opening sequence and multiple times afterward.  He had to improvise when the mechanical shark kept breaking down.  The result was waiting until the last twenty minutes of the movie to show the villain.  The result was a terrifying and exhilarating moment that has become a classic scene.

So, editing is not the search for perfection, but rather the search for what the Japanese call Wabi Sabi or, to paraphrase, the perfection in imperfection.  It is also important to remember when revising that no matter what you do no one, including yourself will be satisfied.  Check out the comment section in this yahoo answers post in which a guy pretended that the first page of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest was his book and asked for feedback. http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100628222722AAdLf0q