The Dreadful Necessity Of Imperfection

Or: “I’ve Started A Podcast To Spite My Current Incompetence!”

My propositions were shy – because asking was shameful, but having my offer accepted would be even worse.  I’d only blurt out my question late at night, usual to people I’d been drinking with, since even saying the words made me a living stereotype:

“Wanna start a podcast with me?”

They did not.  Which was probably just as well.  Except…

I couldn’t podcast on my own. 

My first forays into podcasting would be sloppy, stammering messes – like all beginners’ art – and I needed someone to share the blame with.  Bad enough that “I’m starting a podcast” was the millennial equivalent of announcing “I’m having a mid-life crisis” – but to stand in front of people and be imperfect on my own? 

Podcasting was different from writing fiction.  When I wrote a novel, I could draft and redraft it eight times before I so much as gave an editor a peek at it.  And I’d been writing professionally for a decade, so all my hopelessly crappy writing was long-buried in locked drawers. 

Podcasting solo was basically agreeing to suck in public.

I… am not good at that. 

I tried podcasting on my own – bought the Blue Snowball microphone, read tutorials on Audacity, wrote clever scripts. 

Yet when I read the words, everything fell apart. 

A ten-minute script took me five hours to record.  I stopped halfway through each sentence, needing every syllable to be sculpted to Morgan Freeman levels of perfection.  I’d say the same word seven, eight times until a perfectly normal word like “character” became a nonsense slurry of phonemes, HOW DO U ENGLISH BRO? 

And then, after more hours of painfully stitching together a podcast from hours of rambling, I’d listen to my hard-won podcast.

It sounded stiff.  Robotic.  Unpleasant. 

So I gave up! Even though I really wanted to do podcasts, and videos, and livestreaming – all the fun things that modern kids were doing.  I loved watching, listening, consuming – but creating?  Doing anything other than putting words on paper would involve Doing Art Poorly, and at the age of fifty I could no longer afford to be awful at things.

I was a grownup.

Grownups should be competent. 

I put the microphone away.  It sat on a bookshelf in our basement, to the point where my wife asked me why I’d even bought the damn thing.  I resigned myself to being a writer and a writer only - a shy and retiring man who hid behind the printed word.

Then, this last December, I had a nervous breakdown.  I wish I could tell you it was all the pandemic’s fault, but honestly?  It was just me coming to terms with my own artistic failures.  I’d had a book that had gotten good reviews but hadn’t sold well, and I was questioning whether I was even a writer, let alone any kind of artist. 

I’d walled myself off from creating other kinds of art because I’d be bad at them… but was I even good at the art I’d devoted myself to? 

Because my therapist was on a break (she has severe winter depression and prioritizes care of herself, a badass example of self-love I am inspired by), I started doing automatic writing – a morning ritual of letting words tumble out of my head onto the paper, finding out what I was up to in a stream of thought. 

And the first words on that day were, Do you think you’re that perfect?

If you created a podcast that was absolutely flawless, without an um or an err or a stumbled word, would that even represent who you are? 

It wouldn’t.  The Ferrett Steinmetz I know is both sloppy and authentic.  I make mistakes in public and recant them as best I can, because I tell the truth as I understand it at the time… and then evolve.  Some love me, some hate me – because garnering reactions is the price of living loud. 

What I realized is that, in constricting myself to only do the things I knew how to do well, I was cutting myself into a corner where I poured weeks of effort into a single, pristine creation – and if people hated that (or, worse and yet infinitely more likely, ignored it), then I’d fall apart.

I needed the freedom of failure. 

So I spent a few weeks rethinking my old assumptions.  Yeah, starting a podcast was a cliché – did I need to be original?  Yeah, my audio engineering would be light-years behind people who were on their five hundredth episode – was that an excuse not to start episode number one?  Yeah, my speech wouldn’t be polished –

But did I always speak perfect sentences to my friends?

Didn’t they like me anyway? 

I have the words posted on my Corner of Happiness™ now to remind me: You are sloppy and authentic. 

My Corner Of Happiness™! If you want, you can send me stuff that will fit in an envelope and I’ll put it on there!

And, yeah, I have a podcast – it’s called …And We Will Plunder Their Prose, where every two weeks I study a good book I’ve read to analyze the techniques that made that writing so effective.  It’s intended for writers, but hopefully the casual crowd will get something out of it, since it’s turning out to have a significant portion of book review enmeshed in it.  And if not, well, my podcast has the benefit of being bite-sized; you could theoretically get through the entire episode in a long line at Starbucks. 

The first episode’s up now, an analysis of the prose techniques of Stephen Graham-Jones’ excellent The Only Good Indians, and I can already see at least seven ways I could have improved that sucker –

- but the goal is not perfection. 

The goal is learning. 

This year’s got a lot of projects I’ll be bad at – I’m learning photography by taking a photo a day and posting them publicly.  I’m filming YouTube videos (editing and publishing them comes much, much later).  I’m remodeling a van into a RV.  Hell, I’m even writing a multi-viewpoint epic novel, which I’ve never done before.  And the reason I can do all of those when I couldn’t before is because I’ve learned one fundamental lesson:

Imperfection is necessary.

Imperfection is, in fact, the only way forward.   

Let’s hope you’re imperfect enough to succeed, my friends.

Love,
That Ferrett Boy

P.S. – If you wanna subscribe to my podcast, I promise you I’ll get better at it. 

P.P.S. – If you’re all like “Hey, I thought I was subscribed to you on theferrett.com,” I moved this list over to Substack – in part because so many of my emails from my own website were being blocked, in part because Substack has a much nicer interface where I can do cooler things.  And, like my podcast, I’ll be sending out a newsletter every two weeks. 

If you want to unsubscribe, the link should be right below. 

P.P.P.S. - Oh yeah, and if you haven’t subscribed to my Discord, why not try that? We have cat pictures! So many cat pictures.