An untouched sketchbook can remain a beautiful object for a very long time. Its pages contain no awkward proportions, no evidence that the person who bought it might struggle to draw the things they love looking at. The first mark changes that. Suddenly, an intention has become an attempt, and an attempt can be judged.
Beginning something sounds romantic until we encounter the part where we are bad at it. We imagine playing the piano, then sit down and discover that our hands seem unwilling to cooperate. We sign up for a dance class and become acutely conscious of having a body. The pleasure we anticipated is interrupted by the indignity of needing instruction.
For an adult, that indignity can feel disproportionate. We are accustomed to having some explanation for what we do well: a degree, years of practice, a role that implies competence. An unfamiliar pursuit takes away those assurances. There is no established ability to fall back on, and simply wanting to be there can feel like an insufficient qualification.
It’s a strange requirement to place on an interest. Nobody expects a person to speak a language before learning it, yet we can be remarkably reluctant to extend that logic to ourselves. We would like to arrive at the first lesson with enough ability to conceal the fact that it is our first lesson.
Part of the discomfort comes from having taste before we have skill. Reading beautiful prose does not make a first draft elegant. Admiring a painting does not teach the hand how to reproduce its light. We can recognize what is missing long before we know how to supply it, which makes an ordinary stage of learning feel like evidence against our participation.
Perfectionism can make that gap difficult to tolerate. However, the research offers something I find reassuring. A 2017 meta-analysis published in the European Journal of Personality found that perfectionistic concerns were associated with greater procrastination, while perfectionistic strivings were associated with less. The findings complicate the idea that high standards inevitably keep us from beginning. Wanting to do well and fearing what it means to do badly can lead us in different directions.
That feels especially relevant to a hobby we have not yet permitted ourselves to have. Wanting to improve might bring us back to the sketchbook. Treating an unsuccessful drawing as an indictment of our ability can make the empty pages seem preferable. While the study cannot explain every abandoned interest, it offers a useful question: are our standards helping us practice, or giving us reasons to postpone?
There is also the embarrassment of being witnessed. A private interest becomes harder to protect when someone asks to see what we have made. “I’m learning” can start to sound like an apology, followed by an explanation that we are only doing it for fun. Even leisure seems to require a disclaimer when it produces something imperfect.
Perhaps part of the problem is how readily we confuse a judgment of something we have made with a judgment of ourselves. A drawing becomes evidence of whether we are talented; an unfinished story seems to expose whether we had any business writing one. We give an audience considerable authority before it has even arrived.
Oscar Wilde’s preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray is one of my favorite pieces of writing, particularly for the way it unsettles the relationship between a creation and its audience. “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors,” he writes. There is something reassuring in considering that a response to our work reveals something about the person encountering it, too. Their judgment carries its own tastes and expectations; it cannot tell us everything about what we have made, much less everything about ourselves. We can take criticism seriously without granting it the authority to decide whether we should continue.
Research on motivation suggests that the goal we bring to a task can influence how we respond to difficulty. In a 1988 experiment, researchers Elaine Elliott and Carol Dweck distinguished between goals centered on developing ability and goals centered on demonstrating ability. Among the children studied, learning goals encouraged challenge-seeking and persistence through difficulty, even when perceived ability was low. The experiment was not about adults attending pottery classes, but the distinction is worth borrowing: a lesson feels different when it is an opportunity to learn something rather than an occasion to prove we already can.
None of this requires pretending that improvement is irrelevant. There is real satisfaction in noticing that a movement feels easier, or in returning to an old page and seeing what we would change. Caring about the result can be part of the pleasure. The difficulty begins when a result has to justify the entire experience, leaving little room for enjoyment while our abilities are still developing.
Wilde closes his preface with the wonderfully provocative declaration, “All art is quite useless.” I find something liberating in bringing that thought to an ordinary creative pursuit. A sketch need not become a portfolio piece to justify the afternoon spent making it. Sometimes, wanting to make something is reason enough to begin.
We can also give an interest more privacy than we give other parts of our lives. A poem can stay in a notebook. The first few lessons can pass without an announcement that we have become a person who does this now. Sharing can bring encouragement and companionship, but it need not be the event toward which every attempt is directed. Some work deserves time to develop before it has to withstand an audience.
Perhaps there is relief in allowing ourselves an apprenticeship with no promise of distinction at the end. We may improve considerably. We may remain unremarkable and still find the hour worthwhile. A dance class can give us something that is difficult to demonstrate in a photograph: the pleasure of slowly feeling more at home in a movement that once baffled us.
The untouched sketchbook will always preserve a more flattering possibility than the one we have started filling. But it cannot give us the experience of drawing. At some point, the page has to become less beautiful so that something can happen on it.