You should be worse at this.

The horrors of learning new skills as an adult.

Round platypus has many talents. Art by me.

I’m 24, which means I’m young in general but still old enough for high schoolers to make fun of me. When it comes to learning a new skill — one big hesitation for friends my age and decades my senior is the feeling of it being too late. It’s hard to be bad at something creative as an adult. Especially if you’re lucky enough to be already “good” at a separate skill, it can be particularly alienating to launch back into a state where you are a complete beginner. Kids have the grace of assumed inexperience. But when you’re an adult, there is the real and imagined judgment of having needed to start a creative skill earlier.

Imagine if your friend with no prior music experience told you they were going to start learning the oboe. You’d kill them before their madness spread. But in the heart of your would-be victim is the admirable quality of being okay with looking a bit silly.

Kids are very good at being silly. They often carry an innate understanding of how it feels to create without restriction. Tell an adult to define magic, and they’ll say something boring about the mix of science and culture. A child, however, will get to the root of the matter and say that magic is a pug that can talk. Everyone carries that innate whimsy. But at some point, we are told that a talking pug is technically a poor definition of magic, and we lose that silliness. Being creative as an adult comes best when we summon that part of us less concerned with rigid rules and definitions.

Being creative as an adult comes best when we summon that part of us less concerned with rigid rules and definitions.

Playfulness in creativity is essential even for those who crave structure in their approach to new goals and skills. As we age, we learn more about the bureaucratic tape that prevents us from getting from point A to B. Every headache we experience over the years accumulates to where we often rather not try at all. Say you want your art to hang in a gallery. You either understand or discover that you need to make an amazing painting; you need connections, the ability to manage the timeline with other life factors, and the skills to write good emails. As we’ve discussed before, many hurdles can surprise you as you attempt to adopt a new skill. Be gracious with yourself when such things arise, but like a child who takes chalk to a sidewalk, think not of the street washer who may come by later, and first think more immediately and enjoy the act of putting brush to canvas. If you want a painting of yours to hang in a gallery, you must first learn to make one painting, regardless of quality, and enjoy doing so.

We can think of playfulness as a counter to perfectionism. It’s easy to imagine a great sculptor paining over every tiny detail and arriving at a masterpiece, sparing no time for works that are anything less. But as you learn a skill, it’s good to be bad at something and to be bad at something often. A popularly shared anecdote from Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland captures this idea.

“[A] ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the ‘quantity’ group: fifty pound of pots rated an ‘A’, forty pounds a ‘B’, and so on. Those being graded on ‘quality’, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an ‘A’.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the ‘quantity’ group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the ‘quality’ group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”

The anecdote doesn’t detail each student’s relative enjoyment. But as I think through my writing projects, I’ve found that the ones that allow me to create often allow me to enjoy the process more. 

Recently, I started an Instagram account called Bad Fiction. It’s a place where I can post short fiction pieces quickly with little fanfare and few hurdles. I gave the account its name with the knowledge that you improve by allowing yourself to be bad. Having already been a non-fiction writer for years, I had the benefit of not starting entirely from scratch. But still, for each post, I’ve felt the nervousness of relative inexperience. I’ve caught myself trying to preface my posts in captions or accompany my text with music to compensate for my lack of confidence in conveying my intended emotions. But every time I feel those inclinations, I remind myself that it is okay that these posts not be the best things in the world. I have fun writing them. One is about a guy eating a house, and another is about a person dying alone. Range. I’ve enjoyed sharing my playfulness with a handful of people who may care to look. It’s a good way to do things.

Make up for shunning your friends who want to learn the oboe. Be as a child. Make many things and have fun while you do it.

Keep up with my work: Jadefabello.com

Insta: @Jade__Fab

Fiction Account: @Badfictionwrites

Twitter: @Jade_FW

Apologies for the less frequent updates of late! Work has been Jetset Radioing me across the country. Working on getting a more consistent schedule. Thanks for the continued support, and appreciate any financial contributions — always helps me carve out more time in my schedule for this. Thank ya kindly,