Perfect is boring. Eliminate the word from your vocabulary.
I learned this from my favorite high school English teacher, Mr. L’Etoile, and it has stuck with me ever since. Because it’s so true, especially when the word is used as a describer like when we’re writing scene descriptions. This goes for any creative writing project… or any writing for that matter.
For example, “As the sun set, it glistened off the ocean perfectly.“ “Perfectly” does nothing to improve the description of that sunset.
Or, in character descriptions, like “She was 22, she had the most piercing blue eyes and a perfect smile that would stick with you for the rest of your life.” Perfect smile? That description requires the reader to do the work. What exactly is a perfect smile?
And no smile is perfect and no sunset is perfect because perfect doesn’t exist.
Perfect is boring.
It’s the little flaws in life that make things interesting.
As writers, it’s our job to do better. There are better ways to describe things and characters.
In dialogue, it’s a little different because — characters are flawed, right? — and we use the word pretty commonly day to day.
Or like when a narrator in a story is establishing tone from a certain point of view, like;
“The neighbors next door are the most perfect family with the most perfect house and the most perfect kids and the most perfect dog.”
That’s not so much about describing the neighbors as it is establishing how the narrator feels about the neighbors.
The only other exception according to my English teacher, Mr. L’Etoile, is in the song “Werewolves of London” where the lyric goes, “I saw a werewolf drinking a pina colada at Trader Vic’s… and his hair was perfect.”
That definitely works.
What do you think about the word perfect? Send me a message, and keep writing.
