I was going to write a long rant about contests, and what it means when you don’t award a first place in a division, but I really don’t want to go down that road. Instead, I want to share some good thoughts to encourage you from Ira Glass of “This American Life” via Melissa Worden:
All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. … There’s a gap; that for the first couple of years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great; it’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good … but it’s not that good.
But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. You can tell that it’s still sort of crappy.
This is part of the learning curve. We start out learning a lot of great stuff, and then we get to this plateau where we know all (or most) of the basics. My favorite example is guitar playing - something I’ve been stumbling along with for about 29 years now. You reach a point where you know the basic chords, you know how to strum and how to arpeggiate a chord. But you stumble with the transitions, or you muff the subtleties of your favorite song (you’re far past “Smoke on the Water” by this point).
The same thing applies in learning new technologies and new methods of storytelling. I’ll admit it. I’m in that phase with video and audio.
A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit. The thing that I would say to you with all of my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste, they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be, they knew it fell short. … The most important possible thing you can do is to do a lot of work. … It’s only by actually going through a volume of work, that you’re actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work your making will be as good as your ambitions.
This is where I am at a disadvantage. I don’t have to do it every day. I don’t get the opportunity too often to build up that body of work. It’s not like when I was editing a weekly and had subscribers expecting a paper every week.
And here, I have to push myself to do new things, try new projects. It’s why we started a podcast (one coming on Monday!), and why I drove down to Roanoke with a student last week to videotape all day. It’s why I started e-mailing people and asking them to talk about college media via Instant Messaging. It’s why I join 1500 blog platforms and social networks and put together new media maps and multimedia example databases using easy tools. It’s why we’ll be trying new stuff in New York next week. It’s how I’m trying to get better. It’s what I’m doing to try to help us innovate.
You only get better by doing, and doing it over and over and over.
And there’s a lesson here for college journalists. If your college media outlet isn’t investing time and manpower in developing its online presence, chances are nobody is going to push you to get better at doing it. You’re going to have to do that yourself. Pick something: audio, video, Flash, databases, maps, whatever - and keep doing it. Keep going out and practicing.
As Mindy McAdams says: The most important advice I can offer: You don’t have to know everything. Pick something manageable and practical, and just go ahead and learn it.
And while you’re at it, check out all four videos of Ira Glass talking about storytelling.
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