Sometimes You Need to Publish Something That Sucks

Tuesday December 25, 2012

Something that comedy genius Louis CK talks about (in this video clip) is the benefit of forcing yourself to regularly create new work.

Essentially if you force yourself to create new things on a regular schedule, you end up creating things you never would have if you’d just waited around for inspiration.

A regular schedule doesn’t guarantee regular quality. Quite the opposite. In the course of creating, say, 200 things, maybe 5 of them will be truly brilliant. The other 195 will be a mixture of good, mediocre, bad, and downright hideous.

But unless you make all 200, you’re unlikely to get the few great ones. And either way, your skills will improve in the process.

With that in mind, one of the reasons I started this website (and committed to a one-post-per-week-no-matter what policy) was to try and crank out some decent pieces of writing. One of the hardest things about maintaining it has been accepting that this involves publishing many pieces of writing that I’m really not at all happy with.

This, to be honest, is one of those pieces. Or at least it started off that way; as a whiny admission that I couldn’t work out how to write anything good this week.

Ironically, it’s ended up being about something I think is really worthwhile to talk about; the importance of accepting that the quest to create great work also involves a lot of mediocre work.

And worst case, it has a link to an interesting video clip.