In this 5th issue of The Pole:
Should you listen to your audience? maybe
Being a beginner suuuuucks
We like making creative decisions, not complicated decisions
—
I saw this post on reddit the other day:
This was the top comment:
This little exchange got me thinking about what it takes to make "good" art. Here are some riffs about making "good" art, with a part 2 coming soon:
Should you listen to your audience?
Here's happened in the exchange above:
The artist is trying to get to the finish line. Getting there involves making lots of decisions.
Some of those decisions are consequential.
Some aren't.
The artist wants to save time for consequential decisions.
The character's hairstyle didn't seem important enough to spend that much time on it. Hence, the desire to make one blanket choice and move on.
But the audience fired back. They said no, don't make a sweeping decision. Don't sacrifice nuance for efficiency here.
If you're doing the work as part of a job for a client, then your client is your audience. Listening to your audience in this case is a no-brainer.
But when you're doing a passion project, deciding if you should listen to your audience isn't easy.
Sometimes you have a vision and your audience will get it when they see the finished product. Sometimes they don't know what they want until you give it to them.
Other times, your audience sees things you don't. Other times, you're a beginner. Your tastes aren't that developed, and you should listen.
Being a beginner suuuuucks
There’s a famous Ira Glass quote about being a beginner.
I have it below but TL;DR: at first and for longer than you would like, your work will either be unoriginal, garbage, or both.
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
Why will your work be unoriginal or garbage?
Because
there are a lot of decisions to make and you don't know how they affect each other, and
there are a colossal number of ways to be bad and a microscopic number of ways to be good.
These two statements combined mean
you won't have an instinct for what will produce something good, and
you likely won't make something good by pure luck.
You have to put in a lot of reps first. And they have to be good reps. Perfect practice makes perfect.
You have to, like a scientist, set up proper experiments and establish cause and effect. When you stumble onto something good, you need to investigate why it’s good.
After a while, you'll be able to do good, original work with consistency.
We like making creative decisions, not complicated decisions
Some people like to start out making crappy but original work. Others like to start with good but unoriginal work, using some kind of template.
Starting out with a template is useful because it saves you from making decisions that waste a lot of time.
To help you understand why that's true, I made a graph:
There are three phases of a project:
Phase 1: Overwhelm ("writer's block")
The
closer you are to starting with a blank slate,
the bigger the project, and
the less expertise you have,
the longer this phase takes.
This phase sucks because making the first few decisions sucks. Making the first few decisions sucks because they're the foundation for everything else.
If you make a bad decision at this stage, you might not realize it until you're halfway done with the project. At that point, you might have to redo a significant amount of it.
For example, let's say you're making a space-themed movie. Halfway through, you decide it should be cowboy-themed. This could mean you have to find new actors, new filming locations, etc.
Now you have to all but start all over. Better to be sure about these decisions in the beginning.
Although, if you're a beginner, if it's a huge project, or if it's a ground-breaking project, uncertainty might be unavoidable.
Phase II: The Fun Zone
At this point, you're over the hill. The foundation for what you're doing exists.
You are now in the sweet spot where
you're not sure what the end result looks like, but
you've fixed enough variables so that any experiments you do will show a clear cause and effect.
This is when the output of your creative decisions becomes obvious. It gets fun.
Phase III: Tedium
You've made high- and medium-level decisions. It's obvious what this project is going to look like. There's no more mystery.
Now all that's left... is to Just Do It™.
Doing the work becomes tedious. Other projects start looking more appealing. Heheh...
Beginners vs Experts
It's worth noting that project complexity is different for each person and project.
For experts, it's not their first rodeo. They spend little time overwhelmed, if at all. They also get bored a lot easier.
For beginners, it's the opposite. They spend most of their time overwhelmed.
Side note: this is why hierarchies like doctor-nurses, master-apprentice, director-assistants, etc, exist.
The principal handles the complicated stuff. Then the project gets passed to those with less experience.
And, in theory, over time, everyone's fun zone keeps moving to the left!
Stay tuned for part 2:
everything is a remix
where does business end and art begin?
if no one sophisticates, it weakens the whole system
the difference between novelty and nuance