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A while ago, I attended a birthday gathering for a friend of mine. It was a small group, comprised of about eight women, plenty of wine, and a to-die-for jalapeno dip. Most of the women had known each other for a while, a decade or more of friendship. As an outsider of the group, I had a great time watching the dynamics and getting a chance to meet everyone. The group was relaxed and easy without pretention. And…did I mention the wine?

Two of the women held the distinctive title of Published Authors. They were funny, spunky, self-deprecating. Most of the rest of us in the room considered ourselves Writers of Nondistinction--bloggers, journalers, clandestine storytellers without the confidence of publication behind us. For me, at least, the Published Authors seemed to have an unattainable, unimaginable status that surrounded the women like the effervescent, pre-Raphaelite glow of the Lady of Shallot.

These Published Authors were wise. They were experienced. They had insight. They had literary agents

(Cue the angel choral)

A couple of the guests, including myself, spent about 40 minutes trying to nonchalantly ask questions…questions that might give us a clue to their success but wouldn’t appear too eager or pushy.  “Do you write on a computer or in a note book?” “Whom do you let read your drafts?” “When do you know when a book is done?”

“When your agent gives you a deadline!” quipped One Author.

The Other Author just sat and looked frazzled, exasperated. Somehow, this last question had resonated. She went on to explain that after eighteen months, she had recently finished her most recent novel. Fine. Finito. She had packed it into a zip file, and with a self-congratulatory sense of finality sent it off in an email to her author friends, her non-author friends, her literary agent. (Cue the angel choral)

Except, the moment Other Author hit the “send” button she realized her mistake. The novel wasn’t done at all. In fact, it was woefully un-done. So un-done that she panicked, tried to retrieve it from cyberspace. Once that option fell apart, Other Author started to edit. Edit like crazy, eventually eliminating 250 pages from the manuscript.

“250 pages?” I gasped (not even being able to imagine writing 250 pages) “What was left?”  She looked sheepishly at me and sighed “That’s when I knew that the book was s*&T. When I could cut 250 pages and it didn’t make any difference to the story.”

One Author piped up in protest. She explained that Other Author was exaggerating. She explained that she had read countless drafts of Other Author’s book and it was good. Really good. Other Author was simply being too self-critical.

I thought about this on the way home that night. How often as women and mothers do we stress and freak out over things that we try and pull off with perfection?  Birthday parties for our kids, holiday plans, work responsibilities, laundry, meals, craft projects, whatever our neurosis of perfection is—we just need to learn to let it go…to know when good enough is good enough. We need to learn to listen to our friends when they call us on being too self-critical and we need to remember to call them on it when they are doing the same thing.