Bridging the Endless Taste Gap
Bridging the Endless Taste Gap
Or what happens when you think "everything I make is awful."
I’ve been feeling very much like a beginner lately. Not in a fruitful “beginner’s mindset” way, where your lack of knowledge allows you to be more creative. Just in the frustrating way, where I keep looking around at what I’ve made and thinking, “nope, that is bad.” Same for the writing.
Everything seems to involve a struggle. There are very few moments of flow. Things feel disjointed. It’s like I don’t know what I am doing. It does not feel great.
What do we do when we dislike our own work? When our expectations surpass the reality of what we’re creating?
Two things come to mind.
This is often then cue to take a break, or at least a little pause. Push, push, push is not always a successful creative strategy. Push, procrastinate, pause, regroup, return is often a better approach. There’s a good reason to take a summer break!
This simply is the process. The illusion that we spend our days in magical, dreamy flow states is as much of a creative myth as lightning bolts of inspiration. Creative work is less about knowing the direction that something is going and more about pushing something around every which way and seeing where it ends up, even if that end spot is a deep dark hole that you’d rather not revisit. The only way is through.
Bouldering is anti-flow. A lot of it is just sitting around staring at the wall until you’re ready to make another attempt. Just like writing! And the sheer frustration of it, you come to find, is also the thing that keeps you interested—is even the fun part?
One big difference between bouldering and writing: Clinging to the bouldering wall, I’m not thinking, or just barely. God, how I love to not think! Writing, by contrast, is all thinking, and thinking about thinking, and realizing how a lot of what you think seems pretty dumb when you write it down. (Including possibly this essay?) You have to think better to write better—good luck! To boulder better you just have to keep throwing yourself at the wall.
Ah, but now we’re back to the similarities. To write better you just have to keep throwing yourself at the wall, too.
In that essay Currey shares a Virginia Woolf quote, where she praised another writer for “eking out a delicate gift laboriously.”
This is so often what it feels like, and yet, so rarely what we see when we consume the end product. It’s why I am keeping a process journal while working on my book, if nothing else to remind myself much farther down the line of how it felt to be in the process of writing. Messy sketchbooks are yet another way to keep a process journal—to be able to see how you eventually got to an idea, how something was formed and shaped.
We’re also up against the “taste gap,” as described by Ira Glass.
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit.
Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story.
It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
It's easy to assume that this “taste gap” is inherent in the beginnings of creative paths, something we only encounter when we don’t have enough experience: if we work our way through, then we’ll come to the other side.
That’s true, but it only tells one side of the story.
Taste is always evolving—which means so does the gap that we have to bridge. We hit a point when taste and skill align, and for awhile, the skill may even surpass the taste. We feel great. “I can do this, I love my work!”
But in bettering our creative abilities, we’ve also honed in on our perception and observation. We have read, seen, and learned new things. Our taste has changed. We’re soon back to feeling something along the lines of, “this is terrible, I have no idea what I am doing.”
By closing one gap, we open another—one long endless process that endures for an entire creative life. If this cycle didn’t happen, we’d end up in a creative plateau. That’s nice for awhile because you’re confident in what you’re doing, but it can also start to feel a little stagnant.
To continue to grow, we have to stay at that creative edge. Not all the time, but a lot of the time. The kind of work that we produce when we’re at the edge of our creative comfort zones might make for work we don’t “like” or that we don’t deem “good.” But eventually, if we keep at it, our work grows. We step into a new phase.
Going to those edges allows us to do new and different—and hopefully even deeper—creative work.
recently wrote a piece describing the process of writing one of her recently published essays which helps to illustrate this.“…it’s very exciting to embark on projects that are a little beyond one’s current capacities. I didn’t feel qualified to write an essay like this yet. So what? It’s my belief that the energy and dedication you bring to the project is what ends up making you qualified. You’re passionate about the work and its potential, so you do everything possible to close the gap between your current self and the self who is capable of doing the work.”
In pushing our creative edge we are building our creative selves. We are growing into the work that we admire, that we want to be capable to creating.
Being at the edge of something means that there’s something new ahead. You’ve come up against the wall of the proverbial box, whether that’s your own capacities, your own knowledge, your expertise of a medium. You can either retreat away from the edges and stay in the box or tear it down and build a new one. Or decide that boxes actually aren’t your jam and you want to build something else entirely.
And when the edge just feels like a little too much? Take a break, drink some water, go outside, read a book, ride your bike, call your friends, spend some time in a hammock, jump in the water, engage with the physical, tangible world.
Then return, and continue to take it one step at a time.
-Anna
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Two books that I’ve enjoyed reading lately: Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of the Unsung Sisterhood by Ruby Warrington and The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality by Amanda Montell. Both offer up a lot to think about.
- tries her hand at 6 stroke watercolor landscapes. Seriously, 6 brush strokes is all you get. This is a great prompt for all you watercolor people out there!
I’ve been to a couple of Zoom writing sessions that Mason Currey has been hosting this summer, and they’ve been great. Turns out we all need accountability and somehow it’s easier to write first thing in the morning if you know other people are doing it too?
All of these images of Norwegian artist Anna-Eva Bergman.
This Zadie Smith essay about the recent Labour party win in the U.K. “Of course, like everyone, I am trepidatious. Maybe the Labour party threw that flirty word “change” into its manifesto in a casual, teasing way, like when someone texts: “U up?” Well, Labour party, I’m not even playing it cool. My answer is: “YEP V MUCH AWAKE LET’S DO THIS.”
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I loved reading this! You framed the problem so well—we want to get past that gap between our taste and our abilities, and we want to believe that there’s some point where we’ve “made it” or “arrived” and can stop feeling insecure. But in reality we’ll only feel that sense of satisfaction for brief moments, because as our taste and our creative ambitions grow, we’ll open up new gaps to then cross.
It’s a scary but also very freeing thing to realize—that you never arrive at the point of total satisfaction. Which means (positively) that there’s always some new thing to discover or grow on your work
I think taking a break is an important part to getting back on your creative feet. Sometimes intentionally stepping away, waiting until you absolutely crave it, yearn for it is enough to remind you why you bother in the first place and get you excited again.
It’s hard being creative, consistently. I’m just now learning that it really is a relationship that needs to be seen as such and nurtured and respected. I’ve gotten into the habit of making sure I’m in the right headspace before stepping in my studio. It’s not worth resenting the thing that you began because it brought you joy!