On pedantry

Often times, I would consider myself quite a pedantic person. Not a full-on perfectionist, of course, but I am a person that likes to focus on the details. In practice, it means my creative output is somewhat muted. Truthfully, I only have a few feature-complete projects to my name. On the other hand, I am extremely proud of every finished work I have.

Examples

For examples of my pedantry, one can easily look to game development. At times, I get a bit lost in the small pieces of a larger project, losing myself in places which probably aren't very consequential. For instance, on a game I have been working on recently, I spent what probably has amounted to hours simply testing whether it "felt" better to have rounded or sharp corners on square sprites (in my experience, sharp wins almost every time-for both the developer and player). On this website and others I've made: making small, unnoticable edits (e.g. tweaking div padding or margins by pixel differences), aching my thumb and ring finger constantly switching from code to page, only to see a mildly different image than seconds before.

More examples can be seen even in the making of this very blog post. Is it "often times" or "oftentimes" (the latter)? Should every word in a header be capitalized (depends)? Is this paragraph too long on mobile devices (no)? When referencing a word, do I use double or single quotes (beats me)?

A slight rebuttal

While it may be true that I've lost hours to the futile goal of absolute polish, there are definitely some positives to a pedantic approach to work. For one, nearly everything that you do end up releasing is almost certainly something you are proud of. I don't know of anything as rewarding as stepping back from your metaphorical canvas and smiling broadly as you realize your masterpiece is complete. It gets easier to step away as you gain experience and become more comfortable with imperfections—and eventually begin embracing them.

Striking the right balance

Like all things in life, the truth lies somewhere in the middle: how do we strike a healthy balance between being detail-oriented and idea-oriented? The first step is to acknowledge that you'll never stay in one place or the other; as we grow and change, our attention ebbs and flow in different directions; it's a constant battle that never truly ends, but it's one that you can become familiar with.

One trick that worked for me is placing arbitrary limits on my creative tools. We do this fortuitously when we, for instance, doodle on a napkin in a resturant: lacking traditional tools, we resort to creative means to convey our idea. I'm not trying to say that making crude drawings on napkins will result in a masterpiece, but the resulting work is always personal and representative of the moment it was conceived. When you focus too much on details, you lose that special "lightning in a bottle" feel that separates truly singular art from other, more derivative works. It's why I use PICO-8 to make prototypes, and it's why I made Librewrite.com: placing arbitrary limits on ourselves tends to bring out our inner creativity.

On the importance details

While I'm not exactly certain why I spend so much time on these small, somewhat insignificant things, my working theory is that I secretly love doing it. Spending hours on working a subsystem, solving problems, is highly both rewarding and addictive. It's more fun to find the perfect font than to architect the foundation for a backend. Issues of detail are often bite-sized (or at least they begin that way...) and working on one allows the developer to focus on a small, more managable piece rather than face a daunting monolith of a task.

A commonly shared aphorism about happiness posits that it arises from appreciating the small details in everyday life. This is true, but I think it can also be extended to include that happiness also arises from spending time creating these small details. We all encounter things in daily life which, while ultimately inconsequential, have an intoxicating effect of joy and warmth. It's why we smile when we see a beautifully ornate door handle, or when we read a lovingly crafted acknowledgement in the back of a book, or when we find a loving note at the bottom of a grocery list. In creating, we give life to our works with details, and in turn, these details give life to others.