[2021-03-15] Practice
When I was in my second year of university, I was jealous of one of my friends whose grades for individual classes were often based on only a few requirements over an entire semester: a mid-term and final exam and perhaps an essay or two. Meanwhile, in journalism, I was expected to produce a story every week, with each piece graded and returned before the next assignment was due. To my teenage brain, my friend had the easier path.
But one of the things I learned from all that practice, not to mention the ongoing feedback, is that pumping out an article every week allowed me to hone my craft in a way that would not have been possible had I produced a much smaller quantity of writing.
I recalled this today when perusing Read This for Inspiration, a compilation of creative ideas by writer Ashly Perez. Drawing from the book Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland, Perez recounts the story of two groups of students in a ceramics class.
Group 1 would have to make only one pot the entire time they were in their pottery class. If the pot was perfect, they would get an A. Group 2 would be graded on the number of pots they made throughout the semester: Make fifty pots to get an A, forty pots to get a B, and so on.
Not surprisingly, the best quality products were produced by the students in Group 2, those being judged on the quantity of their output. The students in Group 1 were so obsessed with making a mistake with their one pot that they worried about every decision.
Group 2, on the other hand, learned something new with every pot they formed. By pot number 50, they were able to make the perfect pot, because they had learned from failures along the way. Pot 2 taught them not to add too much water to the clay. Pot 29's lesson was not making their pot too thin. Pot 38 taught them that even a perfect pot can be destroyed by the wrong glaze. This went on until, by pot 50, they had learned it all.
Years after I left university, I learned once again that practice makes perfect, or at least that practice makes for a better, more consistent output. Over the course of nine years, I wrote more than 500 posts in my blog Café Jen. My later pieces were markedly better than my earlier ones. And in the past seven months, I've produced more than 200 posts in Jenesis.
That's nowhere near the production of Oprah Winfrey, who recorded more than 4,500 episodes of The Oprah Winfrey Show over its 25-year run. Still, like Oprah, I've learned that some creative outputs will be remarkable, others less so. But within all that productivity will be some winners. Oprah never knew which episodes would be exceptional, noting in an interview with Vogue magazine quoted by Perez: "Do the work as an offering, and then whatever happens, happens."
The practice of producing something and putting it out to the public—be that a teacher, a reader or an audience—can lead to immediate feedback that helps to separate the good from the great. This afternoon, I watched Love, Gilda, a documentary on CBC Gem about the life of Gilda Radner, from childhood to her death from ovarian cancer at the age of 42. It's not surprising that Gilda spent so much of her career performing before a live audience: She so loved to hear viewers laugh, and if they didn't, she would do something different until they did laugh.
When we start something new in life, it's too easy to think that we should be good at it right from the beginning. My experiments with bread making are a case in point. But the lesson I was reminded of today is that practice—and lots of it—is the surest way to get better at something. And when we combine that practice with feedback from an audience, a director or a coach, we can improve all the more quickly. As for which of our outputs will be considered extraordinary, we never know, which is surely one of the exciting things about the creative process.
