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Comment by temp234 | Hacker News Reader

Does anybody have any reading recommendations or thoughts on the topic of how people _with_ drilled or otherwise refined skills can turn into people who come up with and complete mature creative projects? In creative contexts I know a lot of people who get stuck on just drilling their skills forever or who want to be mature creative project-completers but mysteriously aren't getting it done. I've read a lot about how people get world-class good at things ("10k hours") but I don't think those books explain why one person successfully completes a unique comic, album, short film, or novella and another person struggles with that goal all their days, either only producing derivative work or never completing their work. Some of the focus on "10k'ing" your way to world class skill feels like a distraction from developing as an independent thing-finisher. Some incredible creative work has been completed by people with decent-but-not-world-class skill.

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This question came up in a guitar discussion group I'm part of. Someone who was really good at the drills wasn't happy, because they could kind of only do the drills. You have to perform eventually, which for painting is finishing paintings, musicians performing entire pieces, etc. And I think that's a beginning towards an answer to your question: find something in your hobby (or job!) you love and do that as a performance. Drills are there to serve the eventual performance, they're not an end in themselves.

You are relatively correct. The 10k "rule" and other general guidelines are just that --- guidelines for something that often bucks guidelines and is better for it.

3 things an artist make:

1. Finishing and finishing often. You should not be making the same thing all the time, but you should be consciously iterating in any direction you like as long as you are still finishing. Great painters, writers, musicians, are constantly making stuff, you only see the polished stuff that ends up through the filter.

2. Studying the great works in whatever your chosen field/style/genre. Know the "rules", the normal directions on the map, before you break them and decide on a shortcut or to buck convention all together. All great artists, even the enfant-terrible avant-garde artists, are extremely knowledgeable in art-history in their chosen field and can explain extremely precise opinions on the merits of one artist or movement. Most postures of naiveté are just that: posturing. Great artists know their stuff.

3. Surrounding yourself with other artists. You need people who will look at whatever you finish and tell you about it. Hopefully, these people should be as interested in good art as you, and as well versed or more well versed in art history as you. Engaging in communities of artists will make your imagination and creativity soar.

You absolutely need 1 and 2. You can get by without 3, but you will likely never achieve true greatness without it.

Everything else after that is luck.

I'd somewhat change #1 to "starting and starting often." I see far, far too many art students fall into the trap of wasting hours finishing work when they'd be better off starting more pieces.

Definitely. I think were we to rewrite #1, we could say:

1. Start often and finish often; do not be afraid to abandon something that is not working. Learning what is not working will come from starting and finishing more often over time, along with reflecting on the work you have done. This is where the benefits of #3 come into play. A good community will not only praise your work, they will tell when something isn't working or doesn't work.

I think “finishing often” means precisely that students can’t be spending too long finishing work. They have to stop and move on ASAP so they can finish again. I think there’s importance in finishing vs starting; it’s easy for creatives to get stuck starting a project and never learning how to complete.

How much gets finished is a matter of commitment to working more than a matter of ambition.

The wasted hours are the hours that they are not working on the thing. One hundred hours is only a bit more than four days...and if you use both hands, barely more than two.

For art, it’s not skill or technique that makes someone an artist. It is simply the terrifying decision that what you make is art. Terrifying because the only gatekeeper to being an artist is you. Declare yourself an artist and you are. Call what you made art and it is.

Yup. When I was painting, I spent some time thinking about what it "meant" to be an artist. I finally decided that an artist is just executing a vision in some particular medium.

It is however skill and technique that in large part makes someone a good artist. Like it or not, art is a physically skilled medium.

There is no such thing as good and bad artists. That’s what makes the decision terrifying.

There definitely is such thing, and claiming otherwise is a weird, very recent trend.

Van Gogh is why there aren’t. There are establishment artists and folk artists and lots of oblique trajectories off that axis but that’s not good and bad.

Or as Harry Truman opined. “If that’s art, I’m a Hottentotte.”

I got from “I draw isolated images” to “I draw comics” via the middle step of “I drew a Tarot deck”. I had to figure out a lot of shit about managing long projects that cannot be completed in a single day to do this. Tables to help me see at a glance what was available to work on, at what stage. Ways to think about coming back to the project again and again.

Once I had that done I could tackle stuff like “telling a story” which is a whole other kettle of fish.

Ask yourself what the shape of a finished larger thing is. How can you break it down into pieces about the same size as doing some of the drills you’re used to? What are the parts of it that require new kinds thinking and working? Make time to do that.

Take examples of stuff you want to be making and break it down. For instance I found it a useful comics-making exercise to take a short story by an artist I liked and write one sentence describing what happens on each page. That got me thinking about how much story could easily fit on one page.

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