SpaceNTime describes Creative Doing, “The book really breaks down how one can tap into their best creative self while understanding why your shitty work comes along with it.”
I’ve always described this as quantity leading to quality. Nell Painter writes in Old in Art School, “One of my painting teachers said 85 percent of what artists make is junk. I spent a lot of my time in that 85 percent… All my work, the 85 percent and the 15 percent, comes out of ceaseless experiment.”
The difficult part isn’t actually doing the quantity, I don’t think. It’s in accepting that you are the type of person that will make some—actually a lot—of bad work. There’s less shame in this than there should be; everyone has this tendency. If there’s an artist you love who only releases high quality work, you can bet it’s because they’ve made a ton of bad work in private, and they’ve got a really great process for selecting the best of their work. This might involve other people.
It’s also accepting the process: you don’t actually get to control whether something is good or not. You can make something acceptable, and that’s about as good as it gets; whether it’s awesome to everyone else, or not, is completely out of your control. That’s not an excuse to make junk, it’s a case for you to forgive yourself for the bad work you make, and to understand that it’s actually a part of the process.
Easy for me to type and for you to read, very difficult to practice. It helps not to overidentify with your work; the junk isn’t a reflection of your self-worth, though that also means when something hits you can’t claim pure genius over it.
That’s just one approach to creative work, obviously. It’s the one I put forward in Creative Doing. It’s not definitive, etc.