Seems a little backward, doesn’t it? It’s supposed to be quality not quantity… But that’s the idea behind NaNoWriMo and I think it applies to Polymer Clay or any other creative activity.
Saturday is the first day of National Novel Writing Month. The idea is to write 50,000 words in one month. I was reading a book by the founder Chris Baty (No Plot, No Problem) which described the concept.
Basically, the idea is to have a deadline and the support of other people doing the same project and to write so much and so regularly that you get past your Inner Editor which makes you procrastinate and second guess yourself. The idea is to just write without worrying about it, to have some fun and prove that you can accomplish something. And he makes the point that it’s often not any worse than a normal first draft that you spent hours agonizing over every sentence.
I think the same thing can apply to art. I don’t remember whose blog had the anecdote but it talked about an experiment with a ceramics class. One half of the class was told they would be graded on one piece. They had all semester to make that perfect piece and they agonized over it. The other half of the class was told quality didn’t matter. They were going to be graded on how many pieces they produced. So, they started whipping out as many pieces as they could. At the end of the semester, their pieces were better even though they hadn’t put any thought into quality.
And that’s the idea behind NaNoWriMo. Quality comes about after quantity, and relaxing a bit about the importance of it all. 