Slowing Down

You ever hear the story about pots?

It goes like this: a teacher tells one group of students they will be graded on how many pots they make in a pottery class, while another group will be graded on the quality of one pot. At the end of the semester, the best pots all came from the group being graded on number, rather than quality.

It’s a parable about quantity vs. quality, about how spending time focusing on the qualities of a single product may hamper your growth, while experience and failure can be excellent teachers. It’s about getting wrapped up in details as opposed to finishing your art and moving on. It’s beloved by all art-teachers and life-coaches and people who love quippy parables over the ugly trench-warfare of creating art.

That said, this is one of those parables that can be twisted to mean different things by adding or removing details. When I say “best pots,” for instance, what do I mean? The ones with the shiniest glazing? Most resistant to breaking? The ones voted best by the class? The ones the teacher liked the best? Adjusting or defining the term can really change the message.

For me, when I first heard the story, I wasn’t told the moral. I was left to figure it out on my own, and it wasn’t until I heard it from people who coupled the story with their own moral that I understood the different messages it contained.

Here is how I first understood the parable: the students in one group are graded by quantity alone. If you make 50, you get an A. Make 40, you get a B, etc. The group graded by quality is graded on the quality of one pot. They can make as many as they want, but they’re getting graded on how well one pot is made. This one pot will either be selected at random from the pots they made, or chosen. Random selection wouldn’t be a good method of judgment, so the pot is obviously chosen; but by whom, and how? If chosen by the student, they will obviously choose the pot they believe is best. If by the teacher, they will probably grade the pot they think is best. Either way, it’s judgment that decides which pot is graded.

See, to my brain — the one that has struggled with understanding other people’s behavior — this parable is more about the impossibility of judging audience reaction. If you focus your time on creating something “of high quality,” whatever that means to you, that doesn’t mean anyone else will like it or react the way you intend. Look at the difference between The Room and To Kill a Mockingbird. Indeed, we’re often not even very good at judging our own reactions; consider how many times you’ve been surprised by how much you liked a movie or book you weren’t very interested in at first. As a culture, we aren’t encouraged to explore why we like something, so “educated media consumption” is more of a luxury than expectation.

Perhaps this is part of growing up as a media-outsider; I learned very quickly in life that my tastes were different from everyone else’s. I didn’t have cable growing up, so I was a fan of PBS shows and network cartoons, not Bevis and Butthead or Rugrats. No HBO, no MTV, I never even saw a Nickelodeon show until I visited a friend’s house in middle-school, and I didn’t like it that much. I liked New Age music, not stuff they played on the radio. I found some companionship among the fantasy and star trek loving “nerds,” but even among them I always felt like I was being tolerated, rather than welcomed.

Perhaps it’s cope, but when I look at modern media, I see creative and personal movies, books, music, and artists of all stripes go unrecognized, while uninspired yet familiar re-treads¹ rake in the cash. I see people guide their media decisions with FOMO rather than interest, meaning while success² can breed success, your first success is usually driven by luck.

A lot of this worldview, I’m certain, comes from that part of your early childhood when you’re not aware other people think differently than you. During that period of time, I thought everyone liked Bevis and Butthead only because “everyone likes Bevis and Butthead.” I thought if everyone was being honest, they’d all say “oh, yeah, it’s a bit crap. Never mind.” I thought that most if not all fads were driven exclusively by the need to fit in, which I completely coincidentally had trouble doing.

Now, that’s not to say there’s no truth in that idea. I mean, it’s certainly not a universal driving force in most people’s minds,³ but the fact remains that quality is subjective, and therefore neither a requisite nor a guarantee of success.

“So, (thought I) if I can’t predict what will inspire or resonate with someone else, whether because of my brain being so very different or because there is just so much diversity in the world, my best bet is to cast my net wide. Just keep writing, churning out work at a breakneck speed, and surely some of it will resonate with someone.”

And maybe that’s true. The problem is, I don’t like writing so many short stories, blog posts, and miscellanea of questionable value. It feels like a hobby, like I’m twiddling my thumbs, like it’s not significant enough.

Now, I know that’s a silly metric for measuring my work; significance is an ambiguous concept, but part of being a Better Socrates is working with ambiguities, not discounting them. So, it’s not significance for my theoretical audience that I’m concerned with, it’s significance to me.

There is value to quick and casual writing; it’s like performing scales or just having fun on the court. It’s practice, it keeps things fun, it can shake things loose when you’ve got a block…

But at the moment I’m worried I’m getting too used to it; like I couldn’t write a full-length book if I tried. Even my White Whale, the Ever Lord Series, is now a collection of short-stories and vignettes rather than a series of books. I’m glad I’m producing work, but have I made anything recently that I’m really proud of?

The obvious solution is to start working on a few of my bigger projects, but frankly, with my medication and therapy, things other than writing have become a lot easier for me: I have a part-time job, I’m making a board game with a friend, I’m running and playing in RPGs, I’m getting into OnePageRules, learning the Ocarina, making a Doom II mod, maintaining current friendships, and fostering a cat. I’m still writing almost every day, but even so…my posting buffer is almost empty.

I could churn out a couple more short stories or solo-RPG tales, but that feels like only delaying the issue. The fact is, there’s only so much time in the day to do everything I want to do. Add to that the fact that I want to get back into actually editing my work, perhaps even (gasp) plotting it out, and suddenly my posting schedule seems a little…ambitious.

So here’s what I’m going to do. For the next few months, I’m going to post only on Saturdays. I’ll be focusing on the Ever Lord posts, as well as plotting and editing some more ambitious projects.

This is going to be an experiment for me. If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to strike a comfortable balance between crafting, polishing, and displaying my pots.

As always, thank you for coming along with me.

Scratch the heavens, my fellow Goblins.