I'm not going to sugarcoat this—it is very hard to try again after work you've done doesn't meet your standards. This is particularly true if you're a person who has a fair bit of natural ability and haven't needed to amend, rewrite, or edit anything before. How many people do you know (including yourself) who were quite naturally talented at something but eventually quit without taking the effort to push through their plateaus? (I've done this multiple times in my life.) I want to use this blog post to offer some concrete solutions that have worked to help me learn how to improve past my plateaus. Hopefully they work for you as well.
Get a Teacher
Find someone who is better than you and study what they do. If you have the right kind of relationship with them and they have the time, ask them to help you. Specifically focus on their process and copy liberally when it works for you. Recently I started trying to play the piano again. Music has long been one of those things where I've coasted by on an amount of natural talent and no effort whatsoever. The result is that I have been extremely frustrated by my inability to really get good at it. After two or three frustrating attempts to learn a song on my own, I caved and asked my wife, who is an excellent piano player, to help me learn to practice. As a result of her help, I'm actually enjoying my practice sessions because I can feel myself getting closer to mastering the song I'm working on.
Use Your Good Taste
You have good taste. You do! If you find yourself drawn to creative pursuits, it means you have some instinctive understanding of what works and what doesn't. When you draw, or write, or compose something that isn't as good as it should be, your gut will know where the problems lie. You may not know how to fix them, but knowing where they are is the first step toward a solution.
Recently I had a short comic published in Awesome 'Possum 3, an anthology of science comics. It was the first time I had ever worked with an editor on a creative work. I submitted my first draft (pencil work in this case) to my editor, knowing that I had rushed it a bit and that there were certain panels that didn't quite work. In a twist that will surprise no one, my editor wanted revisions to each of the panels that I knew were problematic in the first place! If I had trusted my good taste, I could have done the revisions myself before submittal and saved my editor some trouble. Take the time and be honest enough with yourself to identify weak areas. You'll be surprised what you find!
Give Yourself Time
Using your good taste to recognize areas that need improvement will do you no good if you don't have any time left before your deadline to revise. An essay that you dash off in a few hours for your class tomorrow might get you an A, but it is never your best work. If your goal is to produce your best work, you have to plan in advance to work on it now, put it away for a day or a week or a month, and come back to look at it with fresh eyes. That way you can recognize the bits that need polishing much more quickly and plan ways to fix them.
Watch and Learn
Often we look at people we admire and sigh "I wish I could do [X] like they do." Well, the way to do that is to figure out how they do things and steal steal steal from their workflows. Watch tutorials, listen to podcasts, consciously try to mimic. Set challenges for yourself and follow through. When you do this, your taste improves and you figure out ways to fix your own work that you wouldn't have thought of by yourself. Don't copy other people's work, but do copy their methods.
Anyway, I hope this is helpful. What are your experiences? Use the comments below to share times that you took the effort to push through the hard stuff and try again.
