There’s a good discussion going on over at the Propellerheads user forum (it’s password-protected so unfortunately I can’t link to it). It began with one person describing how he was having difficulty completing a piece of music he was working on because he was “obsessing over the tiny details”. The responses varied widely - some argued that when you’re stuck, it’s best to let go and move on; others said that details were the most important part so they must be obsessed over; one person even confessed an inability to complete anything because he gets too hung up on the fine points.

For anyone who’s ever embarked on any kind of creative endeavor, this probably sounds pretty familiar. It points to a fundamental problem that all artists have to grapple with at some point:

How do you know when you’re done?

The fine-tuning process is potentially endless - there’s always something you can tweak - so at what point do you allow yourself to stop?

If you’re working with a deadline, the question gets answered for you. Deadlines can be a real pain in the ass, but in this area they’re a godsend because they give you an out: come hell or high water, you must let go, call it day, and let the piece walk away on its own two feet. That can be uncomfortable, especially if the piece still strikes you as being rough around the edges, but it does release you from the potential black hole of tuning and retuning every last detail. And even if the piece still sucks, you can send some of the blame to the “unreasonable” deadline you were forced to work with (and they’re always unreasonable, aren’t they?).

Without a deadline, it’s up to you to answer the question for yourself, and this is when Perfectionism quietly sneaks in through the back door.

Perfectionism is both beauty and beast. The beauty is that it can help drive you to make your work the very best it can be. The beast is that you can get lost in a sea of details, and either continue working on the same piece for the rest of your life, or admit defeat, drop the piece you’re working on and move on to something else…whereupon you repeat the same pattern and eventually end up with a bunch of work that’s all about 90% complete. Neither is a pretty story.

If we’re honest, I think we’d also have to admit that our flirtations with Perfectionism give us a little bit of an ego boost as well. When Perfectionism is in the room, we get to play the role of the obsessed artiste, refusing to compromise on even the smallest detail of what will surely be our masterpiece. We get to show the depth of our craft by pointing out microscopic details that are not quite right and therefore destroy the integrity of the entire piece. And we get to show our unwavering commitment to our Art by refusing to release our work to the world until it is Absolutely And Completely Perfect. Now, please: leave me to suffer with my work.

It’s a good story, and a fun scenario to act out, but I don’t think it necessarily leads to a healthy and productive process. In truth, I think it’s just our old friend Procrastination, in yet another one of his disguises. And it’s a good one too: as long as we can find things wrong with our work, we have an excuse not to finish anything. (Crafty old bastard…)

So the question remains: how do you know when you’re done? I don’t think there’s a single answer that will be applicable to everyone, but I think the solution lies in finding a healthy relationship with Perfectionism - definitely invite it in, but don’t let it overstay its welcome. To help find the right balance, you might ask yourself a few questions:

• Is this the right time for Perfectionism? It can be a great asset when you’re fine tuning the details, but any sooner than that, it’s probably a liability. When you’re just riffing on some new material, or taking some existing material and giving it some shape, Perfectionism can be a very stifling presence. Best to send it home and tell it to come back later.
• Is the piece still moving forward, or has the law of diminishing returns kicked in? Are you fixing details in one place, only to find flaws elsewhere, and fixing those flaws causes you to find flaws in the area you fixed earlier? Some of this can be productive, but it can quickly degenerate into a Perfectionism feedback loop. If you feel like you’re stuck in a repeating pattern, it might be time to wrap it up and move on, or at the very least, walk away from the piece for a while and come at it with a fresh perspective.
• Is it time for a second opinion? It’s often very useful to have a fellow artist that you trust take a look at what you’re doing and see what he or she thinks. Ideally you want someone who won’t candy-coat their reactions to spare your ego, nor offer mindless criticism to help inflate their own. I’ve sometimes found that I don’t actually need the person to say anything - just having someone else in the room helps open up my perspective on what I’m doing.

It’s a delicate dance: how much is too much? Based on my own experience, I would argue that it’s better to err on the side of too little obsessing rather than too much. I’m sure many would disagree with that, but I’ve found that there is a lot of value in finishing, even if it’s not “perfect”.

Finishing gives you a sense of accomplishment, and I think you’ll find that this bolsters your confidence the next time you sit down to work. The very act of bringing a piece to completion, in whatever state that’s in, teaches you a number of lessons you may not even be aware of. It’s a little mysterious how it works, but finishing one piece makes it a little easier to finish the next one.

When you declare a piece finished, you start to create a little distance. As time goes on, and as your work goes on, those details that you had been obsessing over start to become a little fuzzier, and don’t seem to draw quite as much attention as they used to. This is not to say that you no longer see flaws in your work (just about everyone can find something wrong with something they’ve done) but the incessant buzzing of those flaws fades into overall music of the work as a whole, and they’re no longer the distraction that they once were. When you look back on the piece, months or years later, you get a nice feeling of “I did that,” and you’ve picked up a little more wisdom and a little more confidence that will serve you for as long as you continue making things.

I think that’s a pretty good payoff for simply letting a few details go.

(Note: this post went through numerous drafts and rewrites, and I still feel like there are a lot of things that should be fixed. *sigh*)

(cross-posted at my personal site)