I’m going to let you in on a deep, dark, gut-wrenchingly embarrassing secret that I’m painfully ashamed of:
Sometimes I write things that aren’t any good.
That includes my fiction, my essays, entries for this blog, recordings I’ve done, and even my tweets. While I feel proud of a lot of my work, other times I churn out pieces that I don’t feel represent my full potential, and I feel embarrassed knowing that people might be judging me because of it.
Here’s another secret: All creative people feel this way sometimes.
The truth is, making mediocre work is just part of the process, since we all get tired, have to work on deadlines, or go through stages where we just can’t come up with anything better. Rather than letting this mediocrity bother you, here’s a few ways to put a more positive spin on the very real notion that not everything you produce is pure gold.
In the Internet Age, Quantity Matters Over Quality
Youtube legend James Rolfe discussed this recently in one of his What I’m Working on videos, and to some extent it’s shockingly true: sending more of your work into the mind-boggling mass of information we call the internet increases the odds of people seeing it amidst everything else. This isn’t to say that you should just dash off more work like crazy because more is always better, but it’s a good way to justify mediocrity for the moment.
This is because putting more work out there makes it more likely that your work will be seen, and having people see your work builds your reputation as a creator. We all like to harp on the myth of the artist who suddenly bursts onto the scene with glittering, perfect success, but in the real world, that artist’s success followed on the heels of a bunch of lesser works you haven’t heard of—like how Jonathon Larson wrote a futuristic musical version of George Orwell’s 1984 before going on to write Rent.
Producing a greater output also means that any mediocre work you do put out is going to be lost amidst the better stuff—one of the worst moments in X-Files history is the decidedly lame Jersey Devil episode from season one, but how many people really remember this dog of an episode when the series went on to have so many other epic moments?
The Act of Creating Helps You Be a Better Creator
Way back in 2007 when I started my first blog, I had it set squarely in my head that everything I wrote there was just for practice, both in the act of writing, and in maintaining a consistent output, since having the blog as an endpoint for my work gave me something to focus on.
In some ways, I still view everything I’ve ever created as practice for bigger projects that require more skills than I have now, and the work I do on any given day is just a means of sharpening those skills in preparation. This isn’t to say that I don’t treat the work I do with respect, but the stakes feel significantly lower knowing that regardless of the final product, I still got a little better at doing what I do.
This is mostly because (to quote the cliché) learning from your mistakes is important, and mediocre work helps you figure out what aspects of your process aren’t going so well so you can improve them. Malcolm Gladwell says that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery at something, and any work you produce is a small step toward reaching that degree of mastery.
You Can Always Revise/Fine-Tune Your Work Later
Last year the filmmakers over at Wong Fu put out a sequel to their 2006 video Yellow Fever. The original was made on a student budget and gave the world an insight into White-Asian relationships, though the sequel seems to scream out, “Hey, we’ve given this issue a lot more thought and dating’s WAY more complicated than we made it out to be back when we were in college, so here’s some things we didn’t consider!” (Check out the original and the sequel, which are still both insightful and good for a few laughs.)
I use this example to show that you can always go back and edit/revise/update your mediocre work into something better, which you can’t do unless you’ve already attempted the work that turned out mediocre in the first place. J.D. Salinger was still finding his writing legs when he pushed out his early Holden Caulfield stories before writing Catcher in the Rye, and I think we can all agree that Holden’s character just plain doesn’t work as well with a third-person narrator.
Your Mediocre Work Isn’t As Bad as You Think
This can be really hard to keep in perspective, since creative people tend to be more sensitive than the average population and beat themselves up when their work doesn’t go well. But how much of that is because your work really is mediocre and how much is just you being hard on yourself?
Judging your own work harshly shows you have standards—remember in first grade when you thought your cheesy stick-figure drawings were the greatest things ever? How about when you look back on work you did three years ago and think “Oh man, I can’t believe what I was thinking back then!” The reason you’re able to judge it so critically is because you’ve developed perspective, which helps you see the gap between what you made back then and what you would have made if you’d done the same work yesterday.
The same’s true of our own work, which we tend to judge more harshly because we hold ourselves to higher standards. In the real world, though, people care about this a lot less than you think, and you can always take consolation in knowing that your work is always going to appeal to somebody—even Degrassi fan fiction has an audience.
Finally, Making Mediocre Work Is WAAAAAAAYYYY Better Than Giving Up
Realizing your work is mediocre feels so disheartening because it makes you feel like the whole process isn’t worthwhile and that you might as well just quit—or do that thing where you don’t consciously decide to quit but just stop doing your creative work indefinitely while you focus on other things. It’s always sad when I see that happen to people, especially when they really loved the process itself.
Quitting because you feel your work is mediocre just plain sucks, and you should never let this discouragement get to you. For the reasons I listed above, working through the creative process is ALWAYS better than not producing anything, since not producing anything is the first step toward giving up.
Maybe the most valuable reason to keep moving through your mediocre periods is that mediocre work can form a bridge between work you’ve made that’s gone well and work you haven’t made yet that’s going to go well—you just have to keep moving through the mediocrity to get to the next high point.