We are told repeatedly that it is impossible to please everyone, so we might as well make art to please ourselves. That is not terrible advice, as far as it goes; but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. If we make art only to please ourselves, we run the risk of creating masturbatory art. (See “Art or Masturbation?”) Don’t we really want an audience larger than our three fellow artists who “get it”? If so, perhaps we ought to change our approach to the work we create.

This is not to say that our art does not have to satisfy our own aesthetic; certainly, it does. But shouldn’t our art try to communicate our vision to an audience outside ourselves? If we’re not going to do that, why bother to create an artifact in the first place? We create to record or reproduce our vision. This, though, is not enough, at least not for Edgar Degas who said, “Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.”

Reading that quotation this week caused me to think about how artists approach their work in general. (And thanks to Lori McNee [@lorimcneeartist] for the tweet where I read it.) Many artists are so intent on transferring what they have seen and felt to the page or computer or canvas that they forget they have an audience. They don’t concern themselves with making their art to “make others see.”

When we do concern ourselves with that, it changes how we think about what we do. Communications theory holds that the responsibility for the success of the communication rests squarely on the person doing the communicating. If the other person doesn’t get it, it’s the communicator’s fault. Likewise, the responsibility for whether a piece of art communicates rests on the artist. When we accept that, we concern ourselves with not only recording our thoughts and feeling and insights in our art, but in being sure that the audience “gets” those thoughts and feelings and insights as well. So our focus changes; we become concerned with structuring our art so that it becomes accessible—at least to that group of people that we call our audience.

If we do not adopt this approach, we run the risk of looking and sounding as foolish as a stage director I knew once. I happened to be in the vicinity of the bulletin board where a newspaper review of the recently opened play just been posted. The reviewer said essentially that the direction of the show was muddy and s/he had difficulty determining what the play was really supposed to be about. The director of the show stopped, read the review, and began to rail loudly to anyone who would listen that the reviewer should come back as many times as it took for him/her to understand it. He completely missed the irony of calling for an audience member to repeatedly attend an art form that is designed to be absorbed and understood in a single viewing. And he had no idea how arrogant and foolish he sounded. (By the way, the reviewer was correct—the direction of the show was muddy, and the play went nowhere.)

Most of the art we create, even if it is not theatre, must be created with the idea in mind that our audience is likely to see it only once and must be able to grasp at a single viewing what it is that we are attempting to communicate. Realistically speaking, our work will probably not be hung in a museum or saved in a library for leisurely study by our audience.  Our work can be subtle, but it must communicate immediately. Once we realize this, and adjust our process accordingly, we are likely to see a change in audience reaction—for the better.

So I’m on the cusp of finishing the first draft of a very large writing project. The problem is, though the end is in sight, I can’t quite seem to get there. Ideas and anecdotes keep jumping into my mind, all wanting to be added to the project. And some of them are worth putting in, so I have to stop and consider each one individually. The result is that it seems the end will never arrive. As I was dealing with this, a thing called the 80 20 Rule (also known as the “80/20 Rule”) popped into my mind, so I turned to my friendly internet to gather more information.

For those of you who don’t know, the 80 20 Rule, also called the “Pareto Principle” after its founder, an Italian economist named Vilfredo Pareto, says that in any endeavor, “80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.” Although originally applied to economics, it turns out that this 80-20 split can be applied to nearly any human activity. For example, if you type “80 20 Rule” into Google, you come up with an almost endless list of predictive activities. Plug in “80 20 Rule writing” and you get 144 million hits. In the first of these, Stever Robbins says of writing a draft, “The 80/20 rule also applies to writing. Only in writing, you get 80% of the way there in 20% of the time. Then you spend the last 80% of your time getting the last 20% of the polished draft.”

The more I think about it, the more profound the implications of the 80 20 rule seem. It may certainly account for the frustration we all experience toward the end of a project when we are ready to wrap things up and suddenly there seems more to do. It may even be an explanation for the difficulty in writing endings. Every writing teacher I know and almost all writers say that writing endings are the most difficult part of any writing project. Perhaps this is because of the tremendous effort required to produce the last 20% of the project.

Although Robbins has a technique for changing the process—at least for writers—so that that last 80% of the time gets streamlined, it involves adding an editor to the workflow, and just may not be practical for all writers, or other artists. Perhaps the best we can do with the 80 20 Rule is to understand that it is a thing, and work accordingly. Acknowledging the rule allows us to be far less dissatisfied with our progress than we might be otherwise. And that is a step forward in anyone’s book.

The other thing that we can do, being aware of this rule, is to plan our projects to account for the increased effort that will be required toward the end of the project, whether that project is writing, or editing photographs, or perfecting choreography, or directing a play or creating a character. If we know the last 20% will require as much as 80% of the effort put into the whole project, we can prepare for that, and in so doing, produce a more complete product. Put simply, planning our projects to account for the 80 20 Rule will allow us to do better work.