We have to allow ourselves the freedom to make mistakes, including cultural mistakes, in our first drafts. I believe it's okay to get cultural details wrong in your first draft. It's okay if stereotypes emerge. It just means that your experience is limited, that you're human.
Interpretation
Mistakes are a natural part of the creative process and should be accepted as learning opportunities.
In this quote, Gene Luen Yang emphasizes that in the journey of creativity, particularly when drafting stories or works that involve cultural representation, it is important to embrace the possibility of making mistakes. He argues that getting certain cultural details wrong, especially in early drafts, is a reflection of our human limitations and experiences, and rather than viewing those missteps negatively, writers should see them as opportunities for growth and understanding.
In practice
During a writing workshop, a facilitator can use this quote to encourage participants to embrace their early drafts.
I worked in a number of high schools in New York, and I wound up at Stuyvesant High School, which is known nationally for producing brilliant scientists and mathematicians, but I had writing classes. I thought I was teaching. They thought I was teaching, but I was learning.
From my first year on the faculty, there was always so much more I wanted to impart to the students. I decided that, rather than waste the last day of class summarizing the semester, I'd spend my time talking about what I'd learned in life that was useful.
Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.
Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than learning. His conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we properly learn nothing from him, if by "learning" we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information.
By reading so much, my vocabulary automatically improved along with my comprehension.
It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.
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