Know When To Stop

Sticking with the idea of creating your own content and your perception of its quality, there is another issue I want to touch on before I move on to something else and that is the idea of being your own critic.  This is an incredibly bad idea, there's many reasons for this but the simplest reason is that it isn't possible to be objective when it comes to judging our own work.  We will always have a bias when judging our own work and it might be surprising to hear that bias isn't always positive it can be negative, and in the latter it can be much more destructive to our creative processes. 

Most artists are never happy with the work they create.  This might be hard to accept at first if you aren't of a creative mindset or if you look at the finished products of other artists in adoration and fail to recognise the finality of what you see represents the end of a process that hides the intimate details of the process that led to its creation.  Even the artists you would think have the highest self worth, have a proven track record of commercial success, who can seemingly do no wrong, they all have the same self doubt that you do, they have just developed the ability to silence it or ignore it completely.  The only real practical difference this leads to, is that those people tend to have context, they do not create their content alone, no matter how independent they may appear, there will always be people you don't see who have been involved in the process.  When you create something, there is always a desire for perfection and ultimately the greatest obstacle to overcome when putting content out for the world to see is the belief that it's not ready.  If you pursue absolute perfection you will never achieve it because absolute perfection is not a human concept. 

When you take sculptures for instance, there is an adoration that people feel when they look at lifelike depictions but that adoration is affirmed by the presence of imperfections.  When you create representations of the human form that appear too lifelike and too realistic it actually causes most people to feel disturbed, this concept is referred to as the Uncanny Valley a concept that I have written about before which reflects the human reaction to realism with the extreme end of the valley being the belief that the object is in fact real and causing the same reaction as if it were.

Warning: The remainder of this post may affect your perception and enjoyment of certain pieces of music, do not read on if you may find this difficult to overcome.

People need to perceive minor imperfections to believe your work is real, there are times when movies and games for instance will leave certain mistakes in their content without attempting to correct it in an attempt to capture realism.  Dialogue whilst written in a script is not always spoken word for word when it is filmed, actors often improvise or get things slightly wrong, the director and the producer will usually decide when you keep these mistakes and when to shoot again.

Music too often incorporates mistakes as part of the production process.  It is possible for instance to record a singer performing a track in its entirety without recording their breathing, each time they breathe can be muted from a clean vocal track before it is incorporated into the final render, it's even possible to minimize breathiness in the simplest ways through pop filters and in more complex ways through audio processing.  Despite this fact often times tracks created for pop music make no attempt to do this.  You might not have noticed this before but if you dive into your music library and listen to a few random tracks with a conscious mind looking for the artist breathing you will hear it - skip the youtube versions as the audio quality is piss poor and go straight to the HD quality tracks in your music library and listen.  Tracks where you can hear the vocal clearly are better for demonstrating this.

If you take complete control over the creative process and want to retain complete control over the production process that comes after when you have a product to sell then you need to stop yourself from trying to create something that is perfect, it helps to have someone to review your content, someone who can give you another perspective.  I realise with things that are sensitive in nature that it can be difficult to share your work before publishing out of the genuine concern that it may be plagiarised, you can however use professional services that provide a degree of security, these don't have to cost the world if you don't have someone you trust that you can share your content with.  This is one advantage traditional publishing routes still hold over the independent route, that and the resources they can devote to marketing the final product.

The bottom line is that you need to know when to stop and when to recognise it is good enough or as good as it is going to get without compromising the integrity of what you have created.