When you produce media you bring to the table both a skill that can be honed with practice, and an ability to express something latent in the culture of your audience. Two awesome quotes that spell this out:

tumblr.jakelevine.me

tumblr.jakelevine.me

Bob Dylan and Trey Anastasio both talk about their inability to stop producing during their most creative periods.

So my point is that with practice (i.e. producing in volume — though not necessarily releasing in volume), you improve both your skills as a creator of media, and your proximity to your audience's culture.

"When you produce media you bring to the table both a skill that can be honed with practice, and an ability to express something latent in the culture of your audience. "

First: that is profound. That's going to take a minute to digest.

There is a joy in the amateur that is lost in the student and returns to the master.
(or so I have heard)

Does any medium offer an easier route?

@max Exactly! And I'd say that that reality transcends media / or really any creative act.

My favorite Ayn Rand quote is relevant here:

“Whether it’s a symphony or a coal mine, all work is an act of creating and comes from the same source: from an inviolate capacity to see through one’s own eyes . . . which means: the capacity to see, to connect and to make what had not been seen, connected and made before.” – Ch. II, The Utopia of Greed, Atlas Shrugged

That's not something that a tool (if that's what you mean by "medium") can make easy or hard. In fact, "effort" is only relevant when it moves the creator into that weird and amorphous thing sometimes called "flow."

en.wikipedia.org)

Disagree about the idea of transcendence. The "N" theory has to apply differently to different kinds of creators working at different times. For example: the stakes for low N for a filmmaker today are different than those for Ginsburg, who was pumping out verse in the middle of the 20th century. Ginsburg could keep going despite sometimes uneven production. If an ambitious director today blows a multi-million dollar budget? Different story. Creation has context.

With art, and most media-creation, there are two different skills: there is the matter of technical perfection, and then there is a matter of what you want to say. I'm not sure that repetition or practice gets us better at figuring out what to say, only that it makes the translation easier/higher fidelity.

I think it is true that we can teach ourselves to *see* and to *think* more, but I don't think that that is necessarily tied to making, and more to a sort of practice of critical thought and observation.

@eric well said, I stand corrected. Creation costs can be meaningfully different across media types, and when you reduce the cost of creation, you raise the bar for (at least) technical proficiency. For that fuzzy thing about relating to a culture, I'm not so sure.

@nina agreed. That's exactly the dichotomy I was trying to express. And as far as "practice" goes — I think I'm referring to the sort of humility that @max gets at in his quote about master and student. It's the creators that have an insatiable appetite for study and improvement that tend to have the most meaningful and impactful careers.

See also Jiro Ono:
I do the same thing over and over, improving bit by bit. There is always a yearning to achieve more. I'll continue to climb, trying to reach the top, but no one knows where the top is.

Flow, too, is an interesting thing: I'm not sure that I believe in it, not as marketed. I'm a bigger believer in the idea that flow is generated from attention towards some small, dominating thought which makes all other thought unconscious. And, if we believe that for many creators the limiting factor is around insight, in moments when you have a lot of insight, it would drive a lot of creation, I suppose.

@eric I think what you're saying is true, but that's why chunking and practice are different acts from creation: creating a full-budget flick is tough, but shorts or script writing isn't.

Aside, that's why fanfiction is so interesting: it lets people pick up the inspiration of others', and practice writing and creation based on that.

Regarding craft and honing the skill, I'm reminded of an often-told story about a ceramics teacher.

"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…" [link below for the rest].

But, similar to what @Ninkix says, if there is only stock and no flow (Robin Sloan reference below, not Mihály Csíkszentmihályi-type flow), then the cultural connection will be absent.

@rob uh oh, now we've got two definitions of flow out there, this could get tricky.

From @ninakix: flow is generated from attention towards some small, dominating thought which makes all other thought unconscious. And, if we believe that for many creators the limiting factor is around insight, in moments when you have a lot of insight, it would drive a lot of creation, I suppose.

From @robinsloan (just added to the branch): Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist.

Let's call @nina's flow and @robin's streams. (question coming...)

As producers of media, do our two definitions have anything in common? Though I did suggest that "flow" can be improved with practice and volume of production, doesn't producing in volume to the point of distraction (i.e. streams) at some point reduce our ability to reflect and focus?

Or are we just having a language fail?

@Jake I have mixed feelings about Jiro. (Part of that is the result of the film's shortcomings.) I wonder, at what point does cult overshadow merit in this case? And does his laser-like focus *prevent* him from being creative? For me to improve something or to take it in new directions, is it necessary to step away from it and come back with a fresh mind and hopefully some insight from somewhere else?

The language shouldn't be a problem. Flow (focus, often "making") and flow ("feed" or "exposure").

"Doesn't producing in volume to the point of distraction (i.e. streams) at some point reduce our ability to reflect and focus?"

I'd say, yes. Each of us has a different optimal balance between the two (stock and "feed"), but we need both. I'd add that the "feed" can (must?) be a variety of things even for media makers.

Let me try to reframe the point, being careful with language:

Feed (in the robin definition of flow — fast moving streams) is real-time and conversational. It has to do with speaking to an audience, which is how we relate to and understand a culture.

Stock is the more "important" creative acts — the ones that stand the test of time. They are discontinuous innovations that express something latent in the culture of that audience.

The theory that seems to be bubbling up in this conversation, is that without a conversation — without producing in volume — you cannot know the culture of your audience well enough to find those meaningful, discontinuous, "stock" creations.

There's a catch here: outputting a lot of the content that Robin is talking about is more about getting a lot of data on the wall. It's not necessarily insightful, the act of that production is useless with a larger synthesis of the data to uncover meaning (see, anything from Jon Kolko, ever: fastcodesign.com)

There is another stream of content, which is the everyday sketches and creative exercises. These aren't masterpieces or even necessarily your chosen field at all: sometimes it is as simple as an instagram photo.

We can collect more data for our "cultural" streams, which leads to more exposure to cultural phenomena, or we can practice more little bits for our "technical" streams

What's interesting is, it's only been recently that this stream of inspiration and inputs to creative works have been accessible and shareable. I think that's a really interesting by-product of the web, that this can be shared, and thus learned from. We just aren't used to picking up others' information-gathering habits, so we don't often learn as much as we could.

@ninakix

The fact that meaningful creations can take a form that is "as simple as an instagram photo" means that the very systems that we deride for producing things of no meaning are also capable of producing things of great meaning. I guess that's true of any medium, isn't it?

What's interesting about the Internet (though maybe not new) is that the systems within which we now produce things are attached to a growth imperative — meaning, they exist not only as a space for the creation of things, but also as businesses (i.e. as ends in and of themselves).

So while these systems lower the cost of producing, they also teach us to create for the sake of status, followers, clicks, etc. These businesses exist on the basis of MORE THINGS!

I mean, no, I'm not saying that you're going to create a work of art of instagram -- there are some people that can do it, but on the whole, usually not. Rather, that instagram can allow one to experiment with and gain practice with specific, smaller pieces of production: e.g., framing, composition, colors and contrast...

And yes, MORE OF THE THINGS is unfortunate. I think we're going to find that it'll be equally valid for platforms that encourage fewer but better things: there is a reason, for instance, that deviantart is one of the better online art communities around.

@ninakix I agree. At a high level, we're talking about lowering the cost of creating things. Which means more good things are created, and more bad things are created. The problem is that the existing business logic points us towards MOREOFTHETHINGS!

Also, to this comment: branch.com

Someone should start another branch to tackle that one. But frankly, I'm exhausted from all the THINGS.