My own belief is that writing is too intimate and arduous an activity ever to perfect. We need to stop viewing our task as the production of transcendent work. Instead, we should emphasize the process as a gradual reduction of our (necessary and inevitable) imperfections.

Steve Almond from “On the Enchantments and Uses of Bad Writing” at
https://www.awpwriter.org/magazine_media/writers_notebook_view/8/on_the_enchantments_and_uses_of_bad_writing