If you would like to get good at something there seems to be one way to get there. To illustrate the way I am going to quote Art & Fear, by David Bayles and Ted Orlund.
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produces, all those on the right side solely on its quality.
Yes, to grade the people on the left he would bring in a bathroom scale and weigh whatever they made. 50 pounds an A, 4O pounds a B, etc. The other group could be judged on whatever they made. A single piece, albeit a perfect one, would merit an A.
Then a curious thing emerged. The works of the highest quality all came from the quantity group. It seemed the quality group people had spent a lot of time theorizing about what made a good pot. The quantity group just cranked out stuff.
This is similar to the writer who produced 500 words a day, every day. Or William Gibson who once said, “I have spent just about as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television.”
This all came to mind after I verified that I had typed 2185 words today, bring my daily total for (OK, this once) NaNoWriMo to 38, 152 words thus far. I have come to some realizations about this process. A lot of these words are destined for the delete bin. But I do not think I could get the good stuff without the bad. There are sections to my “book/novel” A starter, a foreword section; a Text bit that is the main piece; two parts that do not fit they are lists as in A Book You Can and Should Write, Recipes and Scars; there is a Trash section when I and my brain cannot agree on what to write at the moment.
But this is a “First First Draft” and it brings back a memory of the advice from Ira Glass. That starts with, well near the start he wrote “You make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not.” Yes, you understand what it is to be good, you recognize it, but not yours. You know that your work is not that good. The most important thing to do is DO A LOT OF WORK.
You would think I could type better, but hey, choose your battles.
MichaelRpdx :: rkmm
38,152
And yes, this applies to all kinds of work.