Towards a Practical Perfection.

I think I understand it now: when all those critics said a character was flawed, that imperfection was the hallmark of believable protagonists, they did not hate the great Ideal, nor did they feel such hate for people that they must assume that people never reach that level which they must. It’s rather that they did not value the Ideal as something which could be achieved. They felt, therefore, that any character that met that standard must be fake, and, thinking that the writers shared this understanding, they assumed that such a standard was a lie, invented purely for deceit.


Yet I believed in the Ideal, and that was why perfection felt like a requirement. However, now I understand: that the perfection that *I* sought was not some vague ideal, but rather moral purity. A character could live within the limitations of Reality and still be pure of heart.


With that, I take some comfort in that many of my characters, especially the ones I based upon myself, were “perfect”. They were perfect *not* within the sense of an abstract Ideal that never could be reached, but rather in the sense that they were pure of heart and that, although their means were limited by human frailty, they still aspired to their very limits and, with some assistance from the Gods, beyond them.


That is Life, in summary. I’d never struggle, then, to be relatable so long as I adhered to this. I would not need to burden my inventions with those blemishes which I despised. I would not dress them up with my  own flaws, as though one shouldn’t fix those flaws before one lifts a pen. I wouldn’t need to “face” some deep, dark secret “in myself”, reducing my own self-conception to some horrid object of contempt. No; I would simply strive to be the best and write about the struggle, knowing that my real-life limitations would suffice to ground my fantasy in fact. Those critics did not wish for me to fail and to apologize for failing through my work; they wanted me to tell an honest story of adversity. That I shall tell.


**[({R.G.)}]**


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