MathiasCavanaugh.com

Are you one of those authors that frets over everything being nothing less than perfect?  Do you spend hours thinking how stupid something that happens in your story is, and how it will completely destroy any hope of it being published, or making money even if it does get published?

Don’t lie.  We all do it.

Yet, the fact is that every year stories with major flaws, and just generally goofy things happening within their pages get published, made into movies, etc.  Some of them even make those that wrote them filthy, stinking rich.

And if you doubt this, just think about the movie Star Wars.  Then think about that absolutely weird scene with the monster in the Death Star’s Garbage Compactor.  WTF is up with that?  I mean, seriously, what really was up with that?

Did we really need to throw a nonsensical encounter with a nonsensical monster in between a harrowing escape from the prison block and the cast getting nearly crushed by the compactor itself?  Heck no!  But it’s there.  And the movie has made George Lucas more money than he knows what to do with.

And while we’re on the topic of Star Wars, remember how when Luke and Obi-Wan are at the burning hulk of the Jawa’s Sand Crawler?  Remember how Obi-Wan is talking about how “precise” the blaster shots were and how such precision was only possible from Storm Troopers and not Sand People?  Then remember how, for the rest of the movie, the Storm Troopers don’t seem capable of hitting the broad side of the Millennium Falcon or our heroes as they run down a corridor?  Yeah, see what I mean?

So, just remember this the next time you are worried that something in your own work is just a little too weird or unbelievable.  No story is perfect.  But they can still become smashing successes.