Why am I so bad at being bad at things?
On "the gap" and expectation inflation
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Why am I so bad at being bad at things?
I didn’t used to be. When I was 16, I was obsessed with video games like so many other teenage boys who were alive during the golden era of LAN parties and Halo 3 customs. But I didn’t just want to play them, I wanted to create them. So that summer, I spent most of my time learning the absolute basics of C - literally just how to take text input, print text output, and if-else statements - and then used that to create something that met the barest definition of video game. It was one of those old-school text based games that started with “You’re in a cavern with a torch and you see a passage leading to the north and another passage leading to the west. What do you do?” At most points, you couldn’t do anything but choose to go in one of the allowed directions, the narrative was non-existent (eventually all paths led to death by a dragon or goblin or some other fantasy foe), and it lasted for less than 5 minutes no matter what you did. It had taken me days to create - since I only knew about if-else statements, I had written thousands of lines of codes because each branching direction required another set of possibilities built from scratch, similar to writing a choose your own adventure book. The code was bad, the game was bad, it had basically no redeeming qualities. I knew all of that and yet I was still bizarrely proud of it. “Look, I made this” I said to every one of my friends and family as I forced them to sit through 5 minutes of “Go west, go south, turn back, get killed by a Gru.” It didn’t matter how terrible it was, I had actually created a video game, and that was all that mattered.
Recently, I’ve been trying to get into creative writing as it’s been a lifelong dream to eventually write a fantasy/sci-fi novel. But learning and creating something new now feels… different. I have the characters and the story in my head and I can imagine what’s going to happen in the first chapter in vivid detail. But I start writing and the sentences are just awful. What’s crystal clear in my head becomes a muddled mess on paper. And after the first paragraph, I feel embarrassed and ashamed. I wrote that? The sentences are run-ons, the main character Raine comes across as whiny instead of brave, and my description of the fantastical city of Nel-Ra makes it seem about as interesting as Reno. Rationally, I know that I’m learning something new, I can’t expect my first attempt to be amazing, and I’ll get better over time. I also know that first drafts of anything look very different than even a rough draft that people show their friends, let alone what actually gets published. But for some reason, even though logically I know all of those things, it doesn’t matter. Emotionally, I can’t get over the fact that I can only create something that I feel is terrible.
There’s this quote from Ira Glass that I absolutely adore, about “The Gap”:
“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 it’s 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.”
And that’s obviously what I’m experiencing now, but I can’t stop thinking about that shitty text game I made as a teenager. I still had taste in video games then so what changed? How could I have been so proud of the smallest and roughest accomplishment back then and so ashamed that I can’t get past the first paragraph now? And digging deeper, I think the reason is that my expectations for myself have become inflated. When I was a teenager, I didn’t really have high expectations for most of what I created. Even when I got an A+ on an English essay, I was aware it wasn’t a masterpiece of an essay, it was just fairly decent for a 16 year old and mostly meant I had put in the requisite amount of effort. Creating anything of my own volition, even something terrible, was something to be proud of. But as I grew into an adult, I started getting good at things. I started building real software that people found valuable with solid code architecture. I got promoted, other people thought the work I was doing was great. I became trusted enough to hire and manage people.
And so my expectations around the quality of my work increased. I saw myself as someone really good at what I did. And because I spent nearly all my creative energy in the world of tech, I stopped adding that caveat - I wasn’t good “at tech”, I was just good at creating things. And while this expectation inflation was generally positive, there was a cost. It’s sort of like lifestyle inflation. I can’t imagine going back and living in the semi-frat house I lived in during college, even though I enjoyed living there at the time. Similarly, I can’t imagine starting from scratch and being as awful at something as I was when I created that text game over a decade ago. There’s a gap between what my idols are creating and what I’m creating, yes, but there’s also an even more irreconcilable gap between the quality of the work I’m used to producing related to software and the quality of the work I’m now producing when trying to write creatively.
There’s this deep feeling that I should be producing something an order of magnitude better than what I can actually create. It almost feels like I’ve forgotten a skill that I used to have. And it’s frustrating that the solution is obvious - it’s the advice everyone gives, even in the quote about The Gap. Just keep writing. It’s going to take a while. It’s normal to take a while. You’ve just gotta fight your way through. But just because it’s obvious doesn’t mean it’s easy. So I’ll be here, writing through gritted teeth, trying hard to not delete the last shitty paragraph I wrote, trying to fight my way through. And maybe one day if I keep trying, you’ll read about Raine flying through the streets of Nel-Ra and imagine it the way I do.