THE DUNNING-KRUGER BUMP (or HOW to SUCK LESS in the LONG RUN)
by Barbara Geiger:
by Barbara Geiger:
If you are a
writer and are not getting the response you want from your texts, please watch this amazing video taken from Ira
Glass talking about the gap between your taste for good fiction and your
ability to produce it. It’s amazing how well he articulates the frustration
between knowing what good is, and not
being able to create it yet.
But the gap is
less obvious to some. Writers are not immune to the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
You can read the article, but in simple words it means people who are bad at
things do not understand just how bad they are at the thing they are bad at.
And I’m not wagging my fingers from the comfort of the other side of Ira
Glass’s Gap. I’m still climbing the gap myself.
When I think
back to my early twenties, I remember how absolutely certain I was about the
craft of writing. I did improve in those
five years, and I did see some publishing successes, but there were far more
rejections than acceptances. I played to my strengths in plotting, but I never
went back to do any serious rewriting and my sentence structure often resulted
in word salad.
It took sitting
around a critique circle with twelve other writers on a really hot August day
for almost seven hours to realize we all could figure out exactly wasn’t
working in other people’s writing, but we weren’t showing what we all knew in
our own. We could have handed our
critiques to the person on our left, and any feedback would have been accurate.
I was a rule-breaker
except “there are no rules” which I embraced whole-heartedly. I got off the
Dunning-Kruger bump by really studying why
a story failed, something that is almost impossible to do by reading
published work that has most of the mistakes edited out. Around that time,
a small group of SFWA members wrote a
sting manuscript to catch a vanity publishing house trying to pass off as legit
by writing the worst book in the world. Watching good writers writing badly on purpose
is worth the price of admission, but Teresa Nielsen Hayden didn’t torture
similes, extend them into next week, or drape her chapter fifteen in
purple. In her chapter, to paraphrase,
the main character had supper, talked with his girlfriend for a while, watched
a movie, and went home to bed. For Hayden, the worst possible writing wasn’t
so-bad-it’s-good. Terrible writing was, and is, boring writing, in which nothing
significant happens.
For those of us
caught on the bump, getting down off it can take as little as realizing that no
one is trying to fool you into believing that writing is any more complicated
than it has to be. Show don’t tell works
on all levels from the sentence structure to your statement on humanity. Cutting
or editing anything that doesn’t belong keeps the writing tight, and keeping
the conflict in the foreground as much as possible keeps the readers attention.
The world doesn’t have to blow up; ending a marriage can be cosmically
devastating to the right character.
Show don’t tell
works on the page when you’re describing something, but it also works in the
plot where you show the reader what’s important to the world, instead of
stopping the action during an emotional scene to tell the reader what’s going
on. It even works on the thematic level when you’re showing the reader what you
have to say about the human condition.
Writers could
spend years, if not decades, on the bump, doing the exact same thing over and
over again and expecting different results. A friend of mine said she didn’t start selling short stories until she actually started reading short stories, even though she’d
been told since the very beginning to read the magazine she wanted to sell to.
I didn’t start selling until I realized rewriting is more important than the first
draft. Deleting words used to feel like cutting off a limb. But if they are
extraneous to the plot, it’s not even an outpatient procedure. It’s snipping
off the threads on an itchy tag.
Writing needs
both talent and skill, of which you’re born with a finite amount of one, and an
infinite source of the other. If you are not where you want to be, but are
actively working at improving yourself any way you possibly can, there’s
absolutely nothing standing in your way. If you think marketing is the only
difference between a best-seller and a trunk novel, then you are the thing standing in your way. Some people spend their
whole life on the Dunning-Kruger bump. The view is great, but it gets them
nowhere.
Barbara's Bio:
Barbara didn’t learn that she had lived in three out of the four Northern
Alberta towns that had a known or suspected Wendigo attack until well after she’d
moved south to Lethbridge. She grew up loving ghost stories and pony books, and
spent most of her summers on the British Columbia coast, where she fell in love
with the ocean.
As Angela
Fiddler, she has written The Master of
the Lines series as well as Cy and his sex demon problem books. As Barbara
Geiger, she has written The Tempest
trilogy, starting with Coral Were His
Bones, which exists in the same universe of the Middle Hill series, starting with Changeling, as well as various other novellas and short stories.
When she’s not
blogging about the exploits of selkies, sex demons, and vampires, she writes
about making bread at barbarageiger.me/blog.
You can contact
Barbara (or Angela) by email at barbara_geiger@icloud.com.
