In this blog post viskanv explores concepts he wishes he would have known when he was writing songs as a teen. A lot of these points could be easily applied to other fields, which makes it a good read for anybody doing creative work.
Check out the other posts of that author, they have been blogging a lot so there’s much to see.
Thanks, I’ve subscribed to the RSS feed. I’m not yet in the habit of reading RSS feeds rather than my lemmy feed, but at least I’m populating it.
Also, in the spirit of !savedyouaclick, the main thing he wishes he had known was that it was more important to strive to be prolific, not good, because in doing that you learn so much.
He didn’t mention this, but this reminds me of another story I heard, apparently from Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland:
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 produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
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