Let me start by saying there’s no such thing. You might get close, but perfect is beyond anyone in my humble opinion.

I spent a good portion of my Christmas shopping time also looking for the jacket I was going to carry on my trip to Peru. Now I know my trip is three months away, but when you are as tall as I am, finding clothes to fit you is never easy and finding specialty clothes to fit me is even tougher. Shirts and jackets and fleeces that on most women would reach down to the hips, on me barely clear my belly. Trousers—well let’s just say they are never cut long enough.

So finding a jacket that would be very lightweight, but rainproof enough for the rainy season in Peru, warm enough for the mountains, but still breathable enough when I was climbing UP said mountains (probably uphill both ways) was no small task. I needed to start early. I needed to plan where I would go to look. I needed to plan it all and find the perfect jacket.

I didn’t find it.

Everything was either too short or too short in the arms, or it was a man’s jacket and fit like a box. I finally settled on a jacket that they had to order for me and I’m hoping it will do the trick. Not quite as long as I wanted, not quite the fit I wanted, and it has a hood you can’t hide. Maybe it will work, and maybe it won’t, but the trick is to try it.

Why am I telling you this? Because finding the perfect jacket is a lot like trying to write the perfect book.

Over the past three and a bit months I’ve been writing another novel, this one a romantic suspense set in Cambodia, that I call Shadow Play. Writing it, and the last three books I’ve written, have been some of the most difficult creative exercises for me. Why? Because I wanted them to be perfect. Because I knew if they weren’t perfect, they wouldn’t sell. Talk about the wrong emphasis (selling).

The result was that I was so caught up on all the qualities I couldn’t seem to find in my own writing, that I couldn’t seem to see anything good, and if there’s one thing that can shut down the creative brain it’s the editor on your shoulder telling you it’s not good enough.

Luckily, I’m immensely stubborn and I have some great writer friends who helped talk me through these crises of faith, but the most important thing was to keep reminding myself it doesn’t have to be perfect. In this day and age of computers you can write the story, like I did, and discover the characters and their background through the writing process. Then you can go back and reshape the manuscript to fit the characters you actually wrote.

As I write this, I am chuckling because of something I tell my students in an investigative report writing course I teach. Of course I forgot to apply it to my novel writing.

Apparently there were researchers looking at people’s styles of writing and where writers placed the majority if their times in the planning, drafting, or redrafting process . The researchers surmised that people would spend most of their time planning and drafting with a small amount of time on redrafting.

What they found was that they were wrong.

There were actually two approaches to writing: one was the person who spent most of their time planning and writing. The other was the person who just wrote and found their report through the writing and redrafting process. These people rarely did planning. Both types of writers came out with a reasonable product at the end of the day, but both had deficits in their writing toolbox.

Why is this important? Because the best writers can use skills in both planning and redrafting.

When I initially read this information I laughed because I had virtually gotten through school with never writing a second draft, but it told me I had a serious deficit in my skill set. Writing novels has changed that.

I’ve spent time learning the skills of redrafting and now I no longer have to write the perfect novel first draft. With Shadow Play, the next few weeks will be spent going back and redrafting the front end of the book to be more compatible with the latter half. Maybe not perfect, but pretty darn good.

If only it were as easy to add four inches of fabric to the not-so-perfect jacket.