Lowering the standards

Richard Gabriel in his Lower Standards (PDF; thanks, Rajesh!) cites the book Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland, which tells a story about a university pottery class that were broken into two halves: one half was told that their grades depended on the quality of a single pot handed in, while the other half should get their grades based on the total weight of all their semester’s pieces (50+ lbs was an A, 40-50 lbs a B, and so on).

The best pieces all came from the latter half of the group – the ones “graded by weight”. Gabriel uses this example to illustrate how he as a poet experienced a shift in his writing as he began to write one poem a day, instead of working on a single poem at a time, revising and polishing until it was good enough. The fact that he focused on writing one per day, instead of on writing good poems, he suddenly had lots of poems among which he could pick the ones good enough and revise them as needed (which he found to be less than he had thought).

Gabriel also noted that the poems he selected as “good” were different from time to time and thus his own emotions towards each piece played a significant role in the selection. So he began to experiment with picking poems randomly – which proved to work just as good (provided he’d gotten rid of the ones that apparently were not as good as the rest).

Reading this clicked with ideas I’ve had about weblogging, mostly fueled by the book One Continuous Mistake by Gail Sher (see here – here – here – here – and here), which perhaps even more strongly emphasized the once-a-day part. Sher actually suggested that the emphasis should be on “attending”, not writing, therefore “lowering the standards” so much as to not even require writing anything.

Lately, I haven’t weblogged each day and it doesn’t frustrate me as it did in the beginning, which I think is a good sign. But then again, when I keep to the habit of weblogging at least once a day, it starts to “spin” by itself, resulting in more and more webloggings and also fueling my reading – and this is something I’ve come to like very much. This Tuesday, I will go on paternity leave for three months, and I hope to be able to maintain a weblogging session each morning.