It’s been such a busy year that I fell behind in my reading of The Paris Review, to which I was given a lifetime subscription by my wife in 1979. (I wonder how long that subscription will last?) But I’ve been binge-reading the magazine this week, so I just caught up with in the Adam Phillips interview in the the Spring 2014 issue.

I’d never heard of Phillips, I’m embarrassed to say, but that doesn’t mean the interview wasn’t interesting, as all Paris Review interviews are.

Here’s the passage that stood out for me the most—

In Monogamy, you write, “There are fundamentally two kinds of writer, just as there are two kinds of monogamist: the immaculate and the fallible. For the immaculate every sentence must be perfect, every word the inevitable one. For them, getting it right is the point. For the fallible, ‘wrong’ is only the word for people who need to be right. The fallible, that is to say, have the courage of their gaucheness; they are never quite sure what might be a good line; and they have a superstitious confidence that the bad lines somehow sponsor the good ones.” Do you find yourself in one or another of those?

By aspiration, obviously, I would want to be the fallible kind. Because I would want to feel that in the writing I could try things out and could risk being pretentious, gauche, naive, brash—things I would rather not be seen to be, in order to find out what it’s like. Anybody who writes knows you don’t simply write what you believe. You write to find out what you believe, or what you can afford to believe. So when I write something and it sounds good, I leave it in, usually, to see what it sounds like to someone else. To somebody else it might sound awful or brash, but I want to be able to have the courage of my brashness. I don’t leave things in that I know to be terrible, or that I don’t, as it were, find interesting—I don’t do that—but if there’s a doubt about it and it sounds interesting, I’ll leave it in. And I want to be free to do that, because that’s why I write. When I write, things occur to me. It’s a way of thinking. But you can perform your thinking instead of just thinking it.

What fascinated me about this passage is that in my writing, I consider myself both immaculate and fallible, conditions which I don’t find mutually exclusive.

That is, by the time I consider a story done, I’ve sweated blood making sure each word is the exact word, every comma should remain just that rather than be changed to a semi-colon, that I have neither started my story too early nor ended it too late, and so on. I want the story on the page to match as closely as possible the one in my head. Once I’ve finished, I feel that the alteration of even a single word will change the meaning of the entire piece (a feeling even I recognize is silly). Which, I guess, makes me one of the immaculate.

On the other hand, I recognize that once a story is done, it will contain flaws. And that in fact, it must contain flaws. After all, don’t leather goods come with a tag stating something like, “Leather has inherent slight variations and imperfections, which are normal and add to the beauty of each piece”? And don’t Navajo rug makers introduce mistakes into their weaving as a reminder that humans are not perfect?

Though I don’t intentionally add flaws to my stories (I’m sure you’ll manage to find some nonetheless), what I’ve come to realize is that after a certain level of craft has been achieved, many of those apparent flaws might be more a matter of taste than actual flaws, and are the place where personality shines through. I believe it was Tony Bennett who once said, “What when I was young they considered my flaws, they now consider my style.”

Here’s hoping my flaws are those sorts of flaws. Until a determination is made, I’m happy with my immaculately fallible state, which is one I don’t consider to be contradictory.