Ira Glass on Storytelling - Part 3

This is a very real phenomena where you know you have artistic intuition or what Ira calls taste, but you lack the experience or ability to realize that taste.

He says "do a huge volume of work" which goes against the grain of most rational advice. Why would you want to continue to repeatedly crank out poor quality work, work that does not live up to you vision, your taste? Isn't it a failure to create works that do not live up to your taste? You didn't become a creative person to make bad stuff you became one to make good stuff. I fell into this trap and am still struggling to get out of it. I always felt that I should only do good work otherwise I must be wasting my time. It always bothered me when I couldn't get through a song on the guitar without flubbing a note. I know musicians, even great ones, do this all the time and no one in the audience knows the difference or cares, but I know and I do. This is a kind of perfectionism, which stifles creativity, because it stops you artificially, it stops creativity by making a mountain out of a mole hill. It's always been a bit frightening to think that every artist no matter how great has a lifecycle, that they start out creating "diamonds in the rough" sometimes their most compelling, but technically flawed work, then become successful and do compelling and technically good work, then later in life tend to create highly technically proficient works that have no soul, or the compelling nature of their early, flawed works. It seems like a cruel paradox designed to frustrate the creative person. But I'm getting off the subject.

You've got to do a lot work. You've got to do a lot of copying. Many commercial artists spent hours _tracing_ the figures in comic books to train their hand and eye, to get the proportions right until they could draw them on their own. Copying for a creative person is like training wheels, but they don't often tell you that. They don't want you to think of them singing for a cover band, tracing figures in a comic book, copying a painting. There are dangers in all of this, since you can just create a lot of bad work and never learn anything. Or you can start copying and keep copying and never learn to do anything that comes out of you and your influences.

I've been afraid over the years to do a lot of work. I thought it was best for me to create a small number of really good works, by studying and calculating and then making that one great work and showing it. This hasn't worked out too well since it doesn't give you the opportunity to practice. It's difficult for me to accept that I'm going to essentially throw good ideas away. That I have this great idea nobody's ever had for a photograph or a story, but that if I create it now, I lack the skills to make it live up to my vision. It frustrates me to know that perhaps later, with more experience, I might be able to do better, to make it live up to the vision, but by that time it's already out in the wild and I can't take it back. When you're still practicing, a lot of good intuitions are going to create works that don't live up to your expectations or vision and that's sad, but that is the reality of being creative, that it requires destruction and abandonment, that it requires this period of practice when great ideas fall short of what they could have been. It is part of the paradox. Because for some artists, their early works no matter how flawed may actually turn out to have the greatest success over time and later works no matter how polished and practiced do not move people as much as the flawed but moving ones. That's perhaps something to cling to, that you early works no matter how far short they fall from your vision or technical mastery, may be compelling and moving.

I tend to quit when I reach that point of frustration that my intuition or ideas are solid but the realization and the skills required are lacking. Sometimes it is just a matter of hitting your head against a brick wall until you find the right form of expression. I spent years trying to capture life experiences in poems, stories and songs until I realized I was trying to cram square pegs into round holes. The experiences were brief, intense intuitions about the natural environment, which fit perfectly with the size, form and intention of haiku. All the other forms didn't fit, they were too long, demanded to much explication and metaphor. The haiku allowed me to do what I had always wanted to do, recreate the experience for others, not describe it, not say what it was like through metaphor, but for the reader to actually re-experience what I had experienced.

There is a balance to achieve. There is a successful watercolor artist who started out with good ambition and intuition for painting. He spent a couple of years painting up a storm, making thousands of water color images, but when he attended shows, he could tell his paintings were missing something the other watercolor artist's paintings had. His were good. The other artists thought he had talent, but in reality his paintings, even after two years of exhausting work, were mediocre. He attended university classes in painting and art theory and afterward, his paintings improved technically, but more importantly, in the ideas they expressed. He devised a new method and visual language within watercolor technique based on what he had learned about painting, design and art theory at the university, applying them to his paintings. He became a success both artistically and financially.

To get good at something creative you need to do a lot of work, practice, but you also need to know when to stop and think, evaluate what you are doing. You have to practice, since it is hard to create art works when you lack the necessary skills to create them, but you do not need to become a virtuoso to create lasting art works. Art is about the compelling nature of the work not the technical mastery.