A few months ago, I started a projet with a few friends, whereby we commit to each writing and recording one original song per week, then meet on thursday to listen to everyone's creations and critique. As far as I am concerned, this experience persuaded me that taking more time does certainly not equate producing higher quality material ; up until now, I had taken months and sometimes years (!!) to finish and sometimes never end up recording songs, always unhappy with the final result, and with no deadline, unable to simply let go of my ego and release.
The goal with la Chanson Du Jeudi (www.lachansondujeudi.com) was to adopt a more "Bob Dylan" approach, ie : do one-take recordings if that's all we had time for (none of us are professional musicians in any capacity), and respect the act of creation above that of perfecting. In most cases, we'd end up writing, composing and recording the night before or day of, which led us to go down creative paths that would otherwise maybe have been discarded.
Interestingly, I was talking with a friend last night who is applying pretty the same concept to picture-taking : a group of friends decide on a topic, and submit pictures every week to a Flickr channel and vote on them. Much like the need to produce songs on a regular basis forced me to start recording any little idea that came to me to be sure I had something to close the week, she now consciously takes her camera everywhere she goes for this project's purpose.
Music composition is definitely subject to creeping featuritis. Uwe Schmidt (Atom Heart) combats this by having an idea for a track/song and executing it, never going back, and never spending tons of time wibbling with details. If you know what you want to make, it's really more a matter of implementation. If you don't, well, then you start down the path of Axl Rose and every other band that takes 8 years to make an album.
I enjoyed this article, and this is a topic that I'd love to read more about, read other perspectives - if you have any suggestions.
But I don't think there's one process that's better that the other - outputting new works frequently vs working many years on the same work - and this article felt quite biased against the latter. It never mentions how a work can remarkably stand out in beautiful ways when the author takes the time to let his work grow and evolve during development, even if that means giving into to obsession to details. Think of Kubrick's 2001 or The Shining, Valve's Portal 2. To turn like they did, these works could not have been rushed out. Or think about how the quality of Stephen King's Dark Tower arguably declined once the author decided to accelerate the writing of the last volumes (V, VI and VII) (on the side of that argument, Stephen King has recently stated in interviews that he's thinking about rewriting major parts of those last volumes, like removing himself as a character).
There are obviously many examples of amazing works that were created in a rush of luck and intuition, and of incredibly long processes that turned into failures. But some of the best works in history took years, and grew older alongside their artists before being released. In the end it's about the artist finding the right process for his work and career, whether or not that meets this article's definition of "prolific". Even if the audience has to wait a decade for a work, if the process was the right for that work, it will still be the most beneficial call for the audience.
One other questions is how the artist fits into (or doesn't) the dominant artistic paradigms of his or her time. For example, in his book Old Masters and Young Geniuses (see http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/thinking-about-the-... for much more), Galenson describes how young conceptual innovators often do their best work early and have only one or two important works that create a radically new paradigm for their art.
Other artists learn through making many works, being prolific, and gradually accumulating knowledge that ultimately leads them to produce great works—and often do so later in their careers.
These two ideas obviously aren't binaries, but they provide useful ways to think about art and being an artist.
That game doesn't feel like the most polished thing ever, but the details are sure staggering. Right now, the author is working on making the larger world come alive. Eventually, you will be able to laid siege, plunders towns, and intercept opposing armies yourself.
I think particular cultural contexts and audiences might have more to do with it than any inherent benefit to one or the other approach. What kind of production do we value? What kinds of "intermediate" production are there, where you sort of try out draft ideas? Etc.
I'm thinking of how things have changed over the past 100 years in science, for example, where it's become much more common to be prolific. One reason, imo, is that in the past you were judged (by a smaller group of peers) more by the quality of each publication: it reflected really badly if you wasted everyone's time by publishing something mediocre. Better to put in a little more effort and write fewer, better journal articles. Now, the incentives are different, and it's better to shotgun out the articles, because you're typically judged by your best articles, or even by some measure of throughput like total citation count or h-index, not by your average or worst article.
One of the things I keep meaning to read more about is Simonton's equal-odds rule of science: apparently his statistical analyses of scientific output show that scientists do not differ in 'quality' of output but instead quantity of output - the more they do and publish, the more likely they are to hit a home-run.
(This sort of huge randomness seems possible to me - I think every author or creator has the feeling, at some point, that 'X is not my best or most interesting work, why does everyone like it so much?' Certainly in reading author interviews I've noted that they seem routinely surprised that one particular novel or series took off and made them famous, rather than another.)
I really enjoyed Simonton's work but was quite surprised by the equal-odds rule you mentioned. It doesn't seem to apply to scientists at the highest level e.g. Einstein.
I'm not sure about that. To some degree, you expect that Einstein's fame means that he would get an 'unfair' amount of credit for even his dull papers either because people give them too much credit ("it's Einstein, after all!") or because they get more attention than your ordinary paper which has no fans reading everything that author produces.
But I think Einstein published quite a lot, actually, which would satisfy the equal-odds rule: I recall reading someone mentioning that only one paper of Einstein underwent peer review out of ~100 published, and now that I look, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientific_publications... is a very long page.
Well... speaking about Soderbergh: Solaris was an insult against Tarkovskiy's Solaryis (and Lem?). Sex, Lies, and Videotape was very good and I remember my parents good comments about that movie. In my opinion Kafka (1991) was an excellent movie (9 in my ranking). Erin Brockovich? mmmmmm.... 5. So, in my opinion Soderbergh is prolific but abandoned his art. I would prefer a Soderbergh oscillating between very good and very bad movies but not decaying. I think Woody Allen is a better example.
The topic is very interesting but I believe it is more related to personalities. Some people are more compatible to a prolific personality and some not. Others never release, and only in this case is where the sin appears.
There is an interesting engineering twist on this, releasing early and often. That speaks to being prolific and, in theory, allows people to take greater risks because they know the next chance to ship is near anyway. It collides painfully with the marketing concept of having people pay for each version or upgrade since it could leave a non-functional version out there where the 'fix' is to buy an upgrade. Splitting it, where bug fix (no new features) versions are prolific but feature versions are not worked well for NetApp when I was there. It kept things reasonably stable, but it did lead to having multiple repos in flight.
This is interesting. Also I don't think "prolific" captures sufficiently what the article is about. It's not just prolific-ness. It's being prodigious relative to volume AND quality of work (prolific implies simply volume). Soderbergh might be considered to be prodigious quanti- and qualitatively with regard to the article. Franzen, simply quantitatively.
Conversely I wish I could be prodigious quantitatively. I have a bunch of projects that are basically total crap, just exercises in learning stuff. I'd trade them all for one really awesome, world-changing project. I kind of suck at ideas though.
This really is an interesting and faceted topic. There are certainly valid arguments to be made both ways, but from a personal perspective, I've grown to appreciate the idea of setting aggressive deadlines on creative work.
By nature, I've always been a perfectionist and tinkerer, and while there are benefits to that mentality, there are also severe drawbacks. The inability to start or finish projects being at the top of that list. I've found that setting (and sticking to) aggressive deadlines provides me with a focus and directive that I simply can't get from working any other way.
There is a liberating feeling in the idea of not coveting any single project or piece of work. This sounds counter-intuitive, but when you see each piece of work as a result of whatever constraints you're working within, rather than a cherished opus that will define your life for years to come, it releases a lot of pressure and allows you to focus. I think it's safe to say that a lot of artists wouldn't be where they are were it not for their willingness to experiment often and fail often.
An interesting point was made comparing the proliferation of the Beatles vs contemporary musicians, and suggesting that this is why (more artists producing less) past the 90's we've become increasingly culturally ambiguous.
Of course, there's also the view that we're still too close to the 00's to properly realize what identified it.
