verdantwinter:

darkandstormyslash:

fireandlifeincarnate:

look…………….. write as much shitty fic as you want. nobody can stop you. you’re learning constantly and it’s better to write hackneyed implausible ridiculousness than it is to not write at all out of fear of fucking up. you’re good

There was an experiment a professor did. I think it was pottery students. He did an experiment of “quality” vs “quantity”. One half of the class he told; you have to make as many pots as possible. Good pots, bad pots, shitty pots, whatever. The more pots you make, the higher your grade.

The other half of the class were told, “you can make only one pot”. But that pot had to be perfect. The quality had to be high; the highest quality pot would get the best mark.

But when it came to the grading, they noticed something weird.

All the best quality pots were in the ‘quantity’ group.

The guys who were literally churning out pots, trying to make as many as possible, not concentrating on the quality. But every pot they made, made them better at making pots. By the end of the month (I think it was a month) – they had some pretty awesome pots coming out, because they enjoying finding all the ways and all the things they could do to make all their pots. Where as the ‘quality’ guys had spent their time reading up on pots, and technique, and researching and planning; which was all great but they’d had no further practice at actually making pots.

The best way to get really good at something, the only way to be really good at something, is to make lots of shitty attempts at that thing several of which will fail. If all you create are perfect things then you won’t improve, because how can you improve on perfect?

tl:dr MAKE YOUR SHITTY POTS.

As someone who has actually made a fuckton of shitty pots, I can confirm this is true.

However, I just want to make an addendum to this story that creativity is hard. It’s very easy to say “just make tons of attempts and (eventually) you’ll get better!” It’s very difficult to live this, especially because improvement is very difficult to see when you’re in the middle of it.

AND it is not this smooth curve of Pot 36 being better than Pot 35. Sometimes Pot 35 is a drastic leap forward and Pot 36 is so misshapen that it doesn’t make it off the wheel.

This is okay.

There is this cultural push that improvement is only a linear process and if you fail in any way you’re not worthy to continue on and should give up (or some shit like that).

How do you get around this? You separate quality from what you’re trying to make. 

I bet you that most successful creators, if you actually dug down into their process, were not aiming for perfection or even something they considered “finished.” They were aiming for the truest implementation of their idea they could make, and a product that most closely achieved what they wanted to achieve. Which isn’t perfection, it’s success.