Two-way learning (I hope)

Am having half a dozen driving lessons so that I can hire a car and get happily lost in central Italy for a couple of weeks. In my first lesson, I had a little trouble engaging first and second gear, due to the fact that for 40-odd years I have driven in left-hand-drive countries.

Instructor: Hold the stick firmly, as if it was your boyfriend.

Self (sneers silently, concentrates on driving).

Today it was lesson 2, and I was still having a few problems.

Instructor : Hold the stick firmly, as if it was your boyfriend.

Self (looking at the road, trying to drive smoothly, and speaking slowly and clearly): Mr X, please realise that not all women prefer men. For instance, I don’t.

He did not apologise, but waffled on about gay people having every right to live with their lovers, etc. The next time I failed to find first gear, he just said: Hold the stick firmly.

darkandstormyslash:

fireandlifeincarnate:

look…………….. write as much shitty fic as you want. nobody can stop you. you’re learning constantly and it’s better to write hackneyed implausible ridiculousness than it is to not write at all out of fear of fucking up. you’re good

There was an experiment a professor did. I think it was pottery students. He did an experiment of “quality” vs “quantity”. One half of the class he told; you have to make as many pots as possible. Good pots, bad pots, shitty pots, whatever. The more pots you make, the higher your grade.

The other half of the class were told, “you can make only one pot”. But that pot had to be perfect. The quality had to be high; the highest quality pot would get the best mark.

But when it came to the grading, they noticed something weird.

All the best quality pots were in the ‘quantity’ group.

The guys who were literally churning out pots, trying to make as many as possible, not concentrating on the quality. But every pot they made, made them better at making pots. By the end of the month (I think it was a month) – they had some pretty awesome pots coming out, because they enjoying finding all the ways and all the things they could do to make all their pots. Where as the ‘quality’ guys had spent their time reading up on pots, and technique, and researching and planning; which was all great but they’d had no further practice at actually making pots.

The best way to get really good at something, the only way to be really good at something, is to make lots of shitty attempts at that thing several of which will fail. If all you create are perfect things then you won’t improve, because how can you improve on perfect?

tl:dr MAKE YOUR SHITTY POTS.

Yay! (Goes off to work on an a quality-free academic pot)

semantictheory:

“Socrates said, “The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.” He wasn’t talking about grammar. To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do, for profit, without taking responsibility for what the words mean. Language used as a means to get power or make money goes wrong: it lies. Language used as an end in itself, to sing a poem or tell a story, goes right, goes towards the truth.
A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.”

— Ursula K. Le Guinm