I am a fan of Ira Glass, who has hosted This American Life for the past 16 years on public radio. He and his team have an incredible knack for compelling storytelling. While his creative wizardry is admirable, it is important to note it is a skill set he has spent 30 years honing.
His advice for creativity: abandon crap (video link).
By killing, you will make something even better live. Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.
Basically anything that you put on tape, from the moment you put it on tape, is trying to be really bad. It is trying to be unstructured. It is trying to be pointless. It is trying to be boring. It is trying to be digressive.
Pretty much you have to prop it up aggressively at every stage of the way if it is going to be any good. You have to really be like a killer to get rid of the boring parts and go right to the points that are getting to your heart. You have to be ruthless if anything is going to be good.
Things that are really good are good because people are being really, really tough. And you are going to be really tough in doing it. And you are going to know also that failure is a big part of success. You are going to run a lot of stuff, and it is going to go nowhere. If you are doing that, you are doing it right.
If you aren’t failing all the time, then you are not creating a situation where you can get super lucky. People don’t talk about this that much. That you have to go into it knowing that you have to record and get rid of a lot of crap before you are going to get to anything that is special.
The goal is not to avoid crap. It is to abandon crap after you have created it.
Avoiding crap breeds the mundane. It is fearing imperfection so much that you just avoid creating. At its best, it is manufacturing something old, something safe.
Crap is a natural byproduct of creating. Do not be afraid to fail. Do not be afraid of creating crap. You will. But in the midst of your failure, you will also have remarkable successes. And it is when you abandon the crap, that the successes become even greater.
If you want to be great, don’t play it safe. Create uninhibited and then abandon the crap.
love this dude. so absolutely well put.
Thanks, Troy! You should check out some more of Ira Glass’ stuff.
[...] Abandon crap by Kent Shaffer. My little daughter the artist gets so frustrated when her work doesn’t turn out perfectly the first time. I tell her that she gets closer to the work she wants every time she “messes up” but she doesn’t believe me. When she’s old enough for the word “crap” I’ll certainly share this post from Kent and the embedded clip featuring Ira Glass from This American Life. [...]
Wow – right on the mark. As a working stand-up comedian this really hits home. Writing is like giving birth to something, meaning it’s painful once you’ve created it to then go in with a scalpel and trim the fat or cut it out completely because it’s not working. I struggle with that – but it’s something that MUST be done. Essentially, I write a lot of material, test it, and then my job is to go back and cut out the crap. Great post here, Kent – thank you for sharing!
I’ve seen this in church creative/production meetings so much. It seems so stupid as I type this, but I’ve been in meetings where we get so committed to kill-worthy project because of the work that we’ve done already or even (and I am sad to say this) we just want to use the cool new piece of technology that we bought. Because of this, we produce something half-ass not up to any kind of standard for what the church should be. aiming for. A lot of times, (and I hate this) people use the excuse that it’s a church for mediocrity. That makes my blood boil.
Good stuff – Kill it!
“Create uninhibited and then abandon the crap.” Thank you for this, Mr. Shaffer (and Mr. Glass.)