10,000 Crappy Drawings: The Plan

There's an allegedly ancient proverb that Go teachers tell new students when they are trying to learn how to play the game. It reads something like, "Lose your first 100 games of Go quickly." I never got the hang of Go, but I like the proverb. The gist of it could be that whatever new thing you are trying, you will only get good at it by 1.) actually doing it rather than worrying about doing it "right," and 2.) you will only learn if you go ahead and make mistakes.

I'm fed up with myself for acting like I'm some kind of super genius when it comes to video game, film, and comic book design simply because I can recognize a good thing when I see it. Months ago I stopped writing reviews for this reason (among others.) Since then I've mostly complained about customer service and shoddy products, but I still have yet to actually produce anything of my own other than vague concepts that start with, "You know what would be cool?" I have always ended up getting too frustrated with the difference between the drawing/writing/film in my head and the one that I actually make to get very far in doing anything.

I'm also realizing more and more that I'm part of a generation in which the importance of ideas has been emphasized so much that the absolute necessity of actually making stuff has been marginalized. In reality, a sanitation worker is more important than an artists. A sanitation worker could always collect the garbage without the existence of an artist, but an artist would be buried too deeply in his own day-to-day waste to have time to create art if the sanitation worker didn't show up every week. Yet somehow we value the artist more than a garbage collector.

Yahtzee Croshaw's Zero Punctuation video about web comics (embedded below) really hit home for me. I am "that guy." The one who has seriously thought that, despite an underdeveloped ability to create visual art, his ideas are so brilliant and the details of actually making something are so unimportant by comparison that artists should be lining up to illustrate my shit. I am "that guy" who thinks that College Humor is a bunch of unfunny, distasteful crap, but hey, if they can make money off of it why can't I?

I'm sick of criticizing shit. Even the worst film director of all time has one up on me; he's actually completed at least one film. I want to start making shit. I'd prefer to make great art, but lets face it, I'll have to work through what might eventually be known as "Ben's Shitty Period" before I ever produce anything worthy of getting my work classified into periods. If I ever make one thing that's even worth getting noticed by the general population, I'll be luckier than most people. Post-Modernism be damned. Asshole, rich man-children whose parents own galleries be damned. "Work" is the operative word in a "work of art," but it seems like most people have forgotten that. There's this myth that art is the product of genius that flows forth without effort.

Saying, "That's just CG," or,"They Photoshopped that," is a way to dismiss talent that I don't have. I might as well criticize and marginalize all of the Flemish masters by saying that all of their work was "just" done with oil-based paints, as that was a new technique at the time and considered by many to be "cheating."

Buying the same tools as the greatest artists in the world today use does not make you equal to them, despite what various Apple and other ad campaigns may have told you. As Eek the Cat once said, "It's a poor carpenter who blames his tools." Like plans, a good work of art today is better than a perfect work of art tomorrow. If I'm too scared to put pen to paper because it doesn't turn out like it "looks" in my head, then I'll never get good enough to render my imagination.

It is out of this slough that I plan to pull myself with my "10,000 Crappy Drawings" plan. In short, I can't draw well right now and even when I tell myself I'm only practicing, I get frustrated and quit quickly when I'm not great right away. The plan is to force myself to make drawings that I know will be no good even though I'm trying my best and that around my 10,000th drawing I might actually end up with something good. I will have to keep working on bad drawings until they are finished even when I think I already know that they are crap. Without this disciplined practice, I will never improve. I believe that my story ideas are great, but if I don't believe they're great enough to warrant this kind of hard work on my part, why should anyone else invest their time and energy in them?

I plan to blog a lot less, if at all. This will make effectively zero impact on the world. What might make an impact is if I actually follow through on my plan and get good at something other than criticizing the work of others. Below is the Zero Punctuation video that gave me the painful kick in my balls that I needed to get off my ass and start doing something worthwhile. Maybe someday I'll create something worth getting on NPR for.