In Part I of this article, I talked about how quantity can create quality in the eyes of the reader, and that thus focusing on quantity first makes more sense as an author. Today I will talk about how quantity can create quality in the hands of the creator, making a focus on quantity a necessity for the successful author.
Yesterday I talked briefly about the difference between beginnings, middles and ends and reflected a little on what skills I feel I posses in each of them (lots, some and almost none respectively). Today I am going to start by looking at each of these in a little more depth – what exactly are the skills needed in each of these stages and how well do I compare to what I aspire to?
Beginnings are easy and fun. They’re really just ideas, free flowing and co-inspiring. I have lots of ideas... almost everyone who considers themselves to be a creator does. They may not be good ideas and I may be able to improve my ability to select which ideas are most valuable for a given purpose and I would like to improve on my speed with generating ideas within a context, but for the most part I’m happy with my skills when it comes to beginnings.
Middles are all about putting in the time to create the content and solving issues as they come up. Here I think I need more work, specifically with the discipline needed to continue coming back to the same project to continue work after it has stopped being exciting. I need to learn to push myself to keep going even if the work no longer looks like what I imagined it to be and I cannot yet see what it will become. To believe in what I’ve created already when it looks like I am further from being finished than when I started. I suspect I will always have more to learn about various methods I can use to fix what I am creating so that the result is cleaner as well, and I suspect there will be different tricks in each medium, but for the most part what I need is confidence.
Finally, we come to endings. This is the part of creative projects that I am worst at. As I’ve said before, in over a decade of making games, I’ve only finished one of my own initiative. I’ve started loads... at least two a year... but none of those have ever become complete. While much of the reason I’ve finished so few is because I’ve given up in the middle, I still know that it is the endings that I fear the most. I do not think I know when to end, nor how to end well. Even in my professional work I lose focus at the ends of projects, when tweaks still need to be made, but larger changes no longer have a place.
And that’s it. That is the state of my skills when it comes to creating things I care about. Except it is not ‘it’, at least not completely. Even once a project is finished, an independent creator’s work is not done. In order for a work to connect with an audience, there must be an audience for it to connect to. This is the whole world of publishing and advertising, and it is a world that I am completely lost in. I have no idea what the best things to do here are, and I generally feel a little embarrassed to ask someone else to look at what I’ve created. I really suck at this part of project; case in point, I doubt more than a few people are ever going to read this.
So how can I improve? How can I learn the skills that I am missing? I know that I learn best through reading, thinking and talking. And then, finally, practicing. When it comes to creating finished projects, I’ve read many books, I’ve thought many thoughts and I’ve talked to many experts. What I haven’t done, is practice. I will learn the most by experiencing all parts of the creative process multiple times, not just the first few over and over, or all of them spread over a decade. The more projects I can finish (and be satisfied with), the better. This sounds like quantity over quality again (though quality is still important).
All this is to say that as an author I shouldn’t let myself get bogged down in concerns of quality, especially if these concerns are interfering with my ability to produce quantity. It’s not that I should ignore quality entirely – I always want to do my best – but giving up on something because the quality isn’t perfect isn’t really worth it. If I finish something that is less than my best, I can later build on it both in terms of my skill and in terms of the value within it. If I don’t finish something that is less than my best then I am left with nothing. And nothing is certainly less than something.
Any audience worth having will be willing to let me get better, but they won’t wait around for me to create content if I never let them see anything. And the most important audience isn’t external – it’s the internal one which already sees everything anyways.
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