Perfection

I submitted “Knock ’em Dead” yesterday after more rounds of revision than I anticipated. I went through the story completely at least three times during the morning and early afternoon, each time tweaking sentences and phrases. At the end of each cycle of revision, I felt the story was improved, which leads one to think that it can always be improved.

I was reminded of my scientific background. What crystallographers do is measure the intensity of X-ray spots that are “diffracted” (a sophisticated kind of reflection) from a crystal. We position a counter where these spots appear and count the number of photons for an arbitrary length of time. This is not an exact process. If we went back to the same position a minute later and counted for the same duration, we’d get a slightly different value. This is because the creation and counting of photons has an element of randomness to it. Each measurement has an error associated with it, in much the same way that a survey or poll has a margin of error.

The longer we count, the smaller the associated error. In theory, if you counted forever, the error goes to zero. However, we can’t count forever, and we can’t even count for a very, very long time—because the experiment consists of many different measurements, thousands, tens of thousands in some cases. Rather than obtain a single near-perfect measurement and ignore all the others, we try to minimize the associated margin of error in each individual measurement, but at some point move on to get to the next one.

Editing is like that. I don’t believe we could ever achieve a state of perfection, even with infinite time, because perfection in writing is an undefined state. But we could end up with something where almost all of the words are exactly the right ones, where every sentence flows naturally into the next, where the paragraphs are constructed in the proper order, where elements from one part of the story re-emerge and resonate later, etc. And, at the end of this very long time, we’d have one damned fine story. Most of us, however, have more than one story to tell, so at a certain point we stop, accept the imperfections, the margin of error, and move on to finish the experiment, which is our complete opus.

I watched another fifth Doctor Who series last night, Visitation. I find it funny how the characters can be stymied by such simple things as wood nailed over an opening or a sticky window. They never try to kick through things or smash windows unless it fits the story for them to escape. Instead, they fritter away with a knife trying to pry the planks off the window with a knife. I am pleased, however, that the Doctor’s first impulse upon discovering that hostile aliens had landed in 17^th century England was to offer to help them get back home or elsewhere rather than destroy them. Nyssa spent much of the series in the TARDIS hooking up something that looked like a portable generator to vibrate an android to pieces, but at least it worked. Poor Tegan’s mind was enslaved by yet another hostile creature and the Doctor went from one bout of captivity to the next without ruffling his temper in the least. I dislike Adric, but am consoled that I know his ultimate fate, which is intimately tied to the disappearance of the dinosaurs!