The Art of Imperfection by Connie Berry

 

Most of you know I grew up in the antiques trade. My parents taught me things—recognizing silver hallmarks, for example, understanding the process of creating cloisonné, and identifying the brush techniques used in oil paintings. 

I wish I’d paid more attention!

One thing I will always remember is the “lemons to lemonade” technique used by Chinese porcelain makers. When they experienced a drip or imperfection in the glazing process, they often embraced it rather than discarding the piece and starting over. This photo of a small bowl I own shows how a few unintentional drips were turned into a tiny pattern.

Ancient Roman artists viewed perfection as a trait of the gods and would often make small, intentional errors as an act of human humility. This idea carried into the medieval period where master stone carvers incorporated intentional errors into the great cathedrals (usually where no one could see them). In the same period, monks copying Scripture might turn ink spills into small creatures or patterns in the margins of illustrated manuscripts.

What about books? Someone told me once that there’s no such thing as a perfect book. Is it true? I don’t know, but I remember after publishing my first Kate Hamilton novel when a reader contacted me through my website to point out that in one chapter, Kate uses her cellphone to take photographs while several chapters earlier she had surrendered that same phone to the police. Yikes. How did I not see that? How did my beta readers and small army of copy editors not see the mistake either? In another book, I have two Mondays in a row. Good grief.

Well, I’m not alone. Here’s a few famous typos, contradictions, and continuity errors:

*     * In Iliad by Homer (650 – 600 B.C.), Menelaos kills Pylaimenes in combat; however later in the story, Pylaimenes is still alive to witness the death of his son.
·       In Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona (1591), a ship sails between Milan and Verona, both of which are landlocked.
·       In Julius Caesar (1599), a clock strikes, centuries before clocks were invented.
·       The so-called “Wicked Bible” of 1631 tells us “Thou Shalt Commit Adultery.” The printers were fined £300 pounds each and their licenses were revoked. Most of the 1,000 copies were destroyed.
·       Daniel DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) includes a scene where Crusoe swims naked to a shipwreck but then fills his pockets with useful items found there.
·       Lady Bertram’s pug in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) is a male. Later, however, he is expecting a litter of puppies.
·       In Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlett (1887), Watson’s war wound was to his shoulder. In The Sign of Four (1889), it had mysteriously moved to his leg.
·       In Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile (1937), the American heiress Linnet Doyle says they met her guardian, Andrew Pennington, at Cook’s Hotel in Cairo. Later her husband says they met him at Shepheard’s, another Cairo hotel—which is a second error since in a third place in the story, we’re told the Doyles stayed at the Mena House Hotel.

I refrain from mentioning more current errors and typos to protect my fellow authors. No one is perfect and neither are our books. Which simply proves we’re human. We could take a life lesson from this. As long as there is life, failures need never be final. In fact, it’s often out of failure that success comes…or at least a great story.

Do you have a story of a mistake or imperfection you turned into something wonderful?