Anything You Can Do

In a previous post I wrote of the relationship between reading and how it can improve your writing ability, there was another point I wanted to make however and I wanted to devote an entire post to it and that is the idea of quality.  This isn't something that is easy to define, whilst spelling, grammar, and general semantics play a factor in defining quality from a productive sense, I am instead referring explicitly to the creative sense of quality.  Most things creative ultimately come down to opinion, perception, and perspective.  You can look at various books, movies, and games as forms of artistic expression and see merit in those works but in the process you will inevitably see reviews, and critical assessments of those works which can differ quite markedly from how well those works perform commercially and the attitude to them from a cultural perspective.

To give an example, the Twilight book series by Stephenie Meyer is often criticised and holds something of a meme status in pop culture.  "Still a better love story than Twilight" to that end is one of the most prolific examples of this widespread ridicule the books receive.  Despite this, commercially the series was by any definition a commercial success so too were the movies.  That's not to say they aren't without controversy, and to be clear I'm not a fan of either the book series or the movies and have a lot of issues with the relationship depicted and the message it sends but we can leave those to discuss in another post, or preferably not at all.  In any case the point remains that despite the fact that many people have issues with the content it still did well.  There were critics who panned the series and critics who praised the series, both in terms of the books and the movies.

What all of this demonstrates is that at some point you will come across content that you will think to yourself "I could do better than that" because of the problems you see within the content.  This sentiment is something to be encouraged because it can actually lead to the creation of some very interesting content, and that may indeed be much higher quality in creative terms, but that doesn't mean what you produce will do better.  Creative quality is a matter of opinion, it's not something that is universal, more than this, for something to be a commercial success it needs to be marketed and reach consumers who see quality in your content, but that in and of itself doesn't mean those people will agree that your content is of higher quality.  Whilst there are many movie and book series that have been pitted against Twilight and said to be its competition, the reality is the lines between readers of each series are not as clearly defined as you would think, and in many cases no line exists at all.

Tribalism is a method of creating competition where it otherwise does not exist.  The entire 'Mac vs PC' advertising campaign centred around this idea of creating tribalism as a means to market products.  The reality here is that people who read books tend to read a lot of books, they don't tend to stick to just one book or one series in particular although there are ardent fans as there always will be who would profess to be so devoted, the reality is those people represent a very small minority.  As with the Mac vs PC debate, those who are ardent fans of one or the other make up only a small minority of consumers, the reality is each device had its merits and its purpose and was utilised within industries accordingly.  The divide between who was an exclusive PC consumer and who was an exclusive Mac consumer wasn't as clear cut as the advertising campaign tried to convince you they were.  Both companies knew this quite well, Microsoft did not bail out Apple in 1997 out of the goodness of their hearts, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both understood the role of competition in driving sales, it was beneficial for both companies for people to believe they hated each other - there's even an interview where Bill Gates and Steve Jobs sat together on stage at D5 Conference in 2007 where at one point they openly laugh at the idea and how absurd it actually was.

What all of this brings us back to is one simple point, if you find yourself saying "I could do better than that" then, you probably could, but you have to actually do it first, the only difference between you and them is that they actually did it.  Commercial success isn't tied to creative quality alone, it depends on marketing, and brand awareness, and a myriad of factors that you can approach when the time comes, but you need the product you want to sell before you can get to that stage, so if you think you can do better, go for it, there's no reason not to try.