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How to Gauge Your Writing Skills

November 30, 2020

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.

gauge writing skills
Gauging your writing skills is about understanding the fault lines between past and present
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What Utopia? I’d Pick a Dystopia any Day

January 4, 2018

Once I gave my Gothic fiction students an exercise: I divided them into two teams, with the first team asked to argue why it would be nice to live in a utopia, and the second team asked to do the same for a dystopia. The latter team, upon hearing they needed to argue how great it would be to live in a dystopia, began to murmur – in the style of “oh man, how are we gonna argue for that?”

During the exercise, feelings changed – which had been my plan all along. The team that had to argue for the dystopia began to realize how horrible a utopia would actually be: no change, no possibility to make things better, no real progress. The other team, instead, had real trouble coming up with arguments.

utopia dystopia
Dystopias are ugly. But they can get better. Utopias can get only worse
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