On pottery

I love a good DVD commentary track. Most are a waste of time, but a few are full of insights into the storytelling process. Robert Rodriguez consistently gives good audio. On one DVD (one of the Spy Kids movies, but I'm not sure which), he told this story:

On the first day of a college pottery class, the professor announced that half the class would be graded on quantity while the other half would be graded on quality. Some of the students would be required to make fifty clay pots by the end of the semester. Students who made all fifty would receive an A, those who made forty would receive a B, and so on. The other students only had to make one clay pot, but everything about it had to be perfect. The lesson lay in the fact that the highest quality pots inevitably came from the students who were to be graded on quantity. These students learned from their mistakes, and had enough practical experience that the pots they made kept getting better and better. The students who were graded on quality tended to over-think their designs, and without the practice required to gain the skill, could not produce a high quality pot.

I've thought about that story a lot since I first heard it. I suspect he's right, and yet I'm very bad with letting things go. I'm very much the type to fuss with one pot endlessly rather than make a bunch of pots. Lots of writers advise writing a short story or novel chapter a week (which frankly blows me a way; I could never be that prolific. Not with the paying job and the homescholing, anyway). These writers have various ways of saying why one should do this, but it boils down to what Rodriguez says: it's all about the practical experience and skills that are only gained from output. The bigger your output, the more you learn.

The way I figure it, the slow workers might learn in 40 pots what the fast ones learn in 50 (maybe), but the fast ones do those 50 in less than half the time the slow ones spend on 40. I know some writers who were devestated when their first novel didn't sell. It's tough, because you put so much into it, but at the same time, it's tough - how can you expect to get it right on the very first try?

I spent 5 years on my last novel, which I've never tried to sell (or the one that came before it, for that matter). It was a great learning experience, and the novel I'm working on now is going much faster because of what I learned from writing that one. I had originally intended to revisit that old one when the new one was done, but the more distant I get from it the less I want to. So I'm scrapping it for parts (the characters were cool, if I say so myself).

So yeah, I think Rodriquez is right, but I'm still a futzer. What are you gonna do?