November 30, 2020
How to Gauge Your Writing Skills
Self-reflection isn’t easy, as humans have a tendency for confirmation bias. To put it bluntly, it’s easier to believe in a comforting lie than to face an ugly truth. Writers are no exception – indeed, as we’ll see, in some sense they’re particularly vulnerable to self-deception, but probably not in the way you’d expect – and as a result they struggle to gauge their writing skills.
To Gauge Your Writing Skills, Let Go of Objectivity
This sentence probably surprises you a bit. Isn’t assessment an inherently objective process? How can we let go of objectivity if we need to gauge our writing skills accurately?
And yet, in terms of gauging one’s writing skills, perhaps one of the biggest issues plaguing authors is precisely their belief that these can be assessed objectively.
You see, objectivity entails two things:
- a decoupling from relative comparisons; or, avoiding “this is worse/better than”
- a temporal snapshot; or, the ability to look at an author’s work at a given point in time and return an assessment
Both these aspects relate to context. In other words, objectivity requires taking an author’s work out of context – both their own and in connection with other works – and return an assessment.
This is impossible.
1+1=2 is as correct now as it was a million years ago. It has no context. We can’t even approximate such objectivity when gauging our writing skills.
To say whether a given author’s skills have evolved is an inherently temporal context. Similarly, it’s impossible to say whether a given author is “good” (another pitfall; how do you define that?). We can only say “author A is better than author B” – self-evidently, yet another subjective position.
To Gauge Your Writing Skills, Know Your Insecurities
What this somewhat melodramatic sentence means is this: To learn how to accurately self-assess – a prerequisite before you can gauge your writing skills – you must understand which parts of your writing make you feel uncomfortable.
Is it your world building?
Or maybe the lack of realistic characters?
Perhaps you struggle with over-explaining and exposition.
Whatever the cause, we all have such “insecurities”. And so, if – for example – you feel your use of symbolism is all over the place, you have taken the first step. The next one is to determine the progression.
Has it always been something that has caused you insecurity? More so in the past than now?
Notice the temporal aspect involved here. The truth is, the only way to gauge your writing skills is to compare your current writing to your earlier writing.
No, you can’t draw any safe conclusions by comparing your writing to another writer’s textual production. The next section will show why.
Why Writers Are Vulnerable to Self-Deception
For most people, self-deception means to aggrandize their achievements. Think of ignorance and the Dunning-Kruger effect: Most people believe they’re better than what they really are.
For writers, it’s usually – but not always – the opposite problem: They think they’re worse than what they really are. It’s the impostor syndrome. The reason can’t be really analyzed in any objective sense, but arguably it has something to do with the way artists or writers have a more abstract and affective connection to their product than, say, an engineer.
To put it simply, when you build a bridge it either is within the parameters and stands, or it doesn’t. When you write about issues such as injustice or hypocrisy, you tend to feel you don’t properly express what needs to be expressed; that words simply run out before concepts do.
Two Sides of the Same Problem
In the context of learning how to gauge your writing skills, it’s important to understand that both are a problem. That is, self-evidently, you can’t gauge your writing skills if you think you’re better than what you really are, and you can’t gauge your writing skills if you’re worse than what you really are.
But things are never that simple, are they?
You see, the thing is, what do “better” and “worse” really mean in this context?
In the post about whether good writing can be taught I mentioned this:
a good writer is someone who is in full control of her/his text, expressing the things s/he wants to express, the way s/he wants to express them […] the only gauge of being a good writer is, ultimately, the author her/himself.
And because of this, comparing yourself to other writers just flew out of the window. You can only compare your current writing self with a previous instance of your writing self.
How To Gauge Your Writing Skills: Practicalities and Perceived Imperfection
Assuming you can go through the previous stages – that is, understanding that you can only gauge your writing skills by comparing your own evolution – the only thing left is to do precisely that: see how your writing has evolved.
The truth is, some people only have one story in them. Of course that hasn’t stopped them from rewriting it many times and selling many books. Generally speaking, however, writers will produce more than one story. This makes it easier to gauge your writing skills, because you can reflect on various books from a period spanning several years.
Focus on what I earlier termed your insecurities. If you have written a few novels – as few as three or four – you can likely detect repeating patterns of areas you’re not very pleased with.
Zero in on those.
If you think that, although you’re not entirely pleased, you’re still getting better, then just keep doing what you’re doing; you’ll likely keep improving!
If you think there is no progress, before thinking how to address the issue (outside the scope of this post), do ponder on whether it’s only a perceived problem.
Imperfections make a work personal, after all.
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I have a simple method that works for me: I compare the quality of my writing to the quality of writers I admire. Then I can come up with a list of things that they do very well and decide what in the list I can do relatively well myself and what I can’t (at least not yet). For example I am good at plot (least important, I know), structure, pacing, the logic of motivation and philosophical content. I fall down on description, dialogues, style and language skills. I believe my self assessment is as objective as I can make it.
Like every other piece of advice I offer, this post, too, comes with a caveat: Apply according to your needs. Which means, each to their own. If your approach works for you, that’s great 🙂
And if my post gave you some new perspectives, even better 😉
Because I believe that the writing process is impersonal, pre-personal, and only takes flesh through me, I take all writing as my writing. Obviously this creates an internal conflict, for I do not always write at the level of what I have written in the past, nor of what I will write in the future, nor of what my others, the other writers, have written. This creates a distance that allows me to simultaneously evaluate writing – any writing – as well as to nurture the confidence necessary to write. But speaking of confidence, I had never thought of insecurities. Not in this way. Insecurities in and of the text. Therefore, I will return to these questions.
The textual patterns, mine, are more stylistic than contentistic. They belong to the order of figures of speech – especially figures of construction, of syntax – which are repeated, sometimes exhaustively, from text to text. It is almost a compulsion to repeat. As if I said the same, not because the content is the same, not because what was said is the same, but because I said it in the same way, because the saying, the way of saying, is always the same.
That writing is impersonal (pre-personal; there’s a thought… ) is a very intriguing way of putting it. It very tangentially reminds me of a feeling I sometimes have: I see something online, and I feel a pressing need to mention what in my opinion is important. Only, with untold relief, I notice someone else has already done that (say, in a comment). I’m happy at that point; the concept was expressed, and it makes zero difference who was its author.
Insecurities are as good a tool as anything else. When I find one, there is a huge flurry of study until I figure out how to deal with something I didn’t know how to do, and now need to learn.
There is a list, a finite list, of things a writer should master. How to write a fight scene. How to describe a kiss. How to guide a reader to understand what happens to a woman whose child lies in a grave at her feet. Plot, character, theme, genre. How and why to foreshadow. What makes an ending satisfying.
I am always learning, and have been doing so for twenty-five years of formal fiction writing.
And it will always come down to: there is a group of readers who sees things my way, and those (plus myself) are the ones I have to fulfill. We have high standards: so be it.
Everyone else’s opinion is, well, wrong – for me and for my writing. I can live with that. NO writer can please everyone. You satisfy yourself, and find the others who like it. And hope it doesn’t get ruined by being assigned to high school or college students as required reading.
That last part, involving required reading, made me smile 😉
But yeah, well said; pleasing others is very tricky, and trying to please everyone a recipe for disaster.
So many people have commented that having to read something for school ruined it for them. I never had that experience in English; I went to school in Spanish. I usually read all my textbooks before school started – and then suffered through the classes.