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silveradept[Welcome back to December Days. This year, thanks to a suggestion from alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a few days left.]
One of the things that's nearly constant as you go through archives and find people who you want to follow and bookmark works is that there's a lot of really good stuff out there. And your taste, remember, almost always starts out ahead of your skills, so it's very easy for you to find a lot of the really good stuff that is out there. A steady diet of good material in your favorite fandom and you're going to be confronting some fairly impressive counts on whatever statistical anything your archive of choice decides to track. And, if you're like me, your own counts aren't necessarily ever going to be that high, based on the work that you're doing. It can lead to a period of disappointment, even though, as we already covered, the metrics themselves are always a little sketchy about what they actually do and don't say about everything.
It's one of those things that we have to get used to - there's always someone better. By whatever metric of better that you want to use. Someone who has words just flowing off the page, running in all the right directions to create a moving and compelling story that sweeps you off your feet and brings you along for the ride. All the feels in all the right places. Or who clearly has the attention of the fandom, racking up all the hits, kudos, and comments in their work any time it gets posted. The ones with the dedicated community of followers that are looking forward to their next release and can't get enough of it.
The published, professional authors who get to do this as a career and have made a shirt ton of money to the point where they wouldn't have to create again and they'd still have money left over after it all.
There are also often the people who seem to have made it to the heights of fame and fortune despite not possessing a bone of talent in their bodies, but often times, that's our prejudices about what's good work getting in the way of our ability to see the good stuff that's on the page. I think Ender's Game is a terrible book, but I can also see that it's a very successful power fantasy narrative for young boys steeped in a culture of toxic masculinity. The Chronicles of Narnia are a theological mess, and racist as all get out, but when not trying to make it about Lion Jesus, there's a good story and evocative descriptions of the scenery around the characters. I don't particularly like Twilight, for a lot of reasons related to the way every man in the story treats Bella, but it functions extremely well as a (relatively) sex-positive romance about a depressed young woman who eventually gets everything she wants through her own agency and determination. I might think Fifty Shades of Grey is an utter trash fire of a book, but I can thank it for spawning a lot of good and useful conversations about consent, kink, and what actually goes on in relationships with dynamics. And, even so, it's a book about someone being pampered by a wealthy person and managing to fix his mental health issues - it's a fantasy, and read that way, with full knowledge that what happens in that story has no basis in reality, is probably decent enough material for the imagination for whatever purposes people have fantasies.
Both of these ideas (that there's always someone better and there's always someone that you can't understand why they get all the accolades) can combine to produce the feeling of hopelessness. Why do the writing at all if someone else is going to be better or more statistically important and your own work is going to be not noticed at all? If there's always someone better, why try in the first place?
This is why we stared the series framing it as you already being good enough. It could have been "You are already good," but for a lot of people, even if it's true, it rings hollow, because "good" is almost always "better than me" for a lot of people. And as skill rises and taste appreciates more about the works that exist, the window of what is "good" increases as well, looking always forward about what things aren't yet achievable rather than occasionally looking back and realizing that there's been a lot of ground covered from when you first started. (As we noted then, as well, where people put their start point is usually way too far into the future compared to the actual reality of when they started doing the things that led to the creation of their work.) And sometimes, even as you're looking ahead, you might be slowly building that following and those statistical counts that point out you are quite good at what you are doing.
At a certain point, there's a good chance you'll be someone else's "always someone better." Whether in general, because your work is consumed along with everyone else's to a person that works they're never going to make it, or specifically, because you've become a respected creator in the domain you are currently in and people are in awe of what you create.
Even as I wrote that sentence, my own brain said "There's no way you're one of those people," except, of course, that I don't know that, because I can't reach into the heads of everyone whose read my work and see whether or not it's true. And this is despite the knowledge that earlier in the month,liv, who I respect a great deal as a person and writer explicitly said "Hey, people who read me? silveradept is a person worth reading." Because brains will compartmentalize to make sure their preferred narratives don't get disrupted by such things as evidence to the contrary. Specifically, in this case, "oh, that's very clearly only about my nonfiction writing, and has nothing to do with my fiction writing, so it can't possibly be a comment on my writing skill overall." I know that we're supposed to treat ourselves in the same way that we would treat our friends if they were spouting that sort of things -- and I do treat my friends differently than myself -- but it is sometimes hard to make that leap from treating others compassionately to treating yourself compassionately. And I've been writing for years.
Because it doesn't get said enough, we are all good enough. There will always be someone better, but that doesn't mean we aren't good enough as we are. And to others, there's a good chance we are the someone better. So our work is to be welcoming to those who look up to us, even as we hope those that we look up to will do the same for us. And that way, we all get better.
alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a few days left.]One of the things that's nearly constant as you go through archives and find people who you want to follow and bookmark works is that there's a lot of really good stuff out there. And your taste, remember, almost always starts out ahead of your skills, so it's very easy for you to find a lot of the really good stuff that is out there. A steady diet of good material in your favorite fandom and you're going to be confronting some fairly impressive counts on whatever statistical anything your archive of choice decides to track. And, if you're like me, your own counts aren't necessarily ever going to be that high, based on the work that you're doing. It can lead to a period of disappointment, even though, as we already covered, the metrics themselves are always a little sketchy about what they actually do and don't say about everything.
It's one of those things that we have to get used to - there's always someone better. By whatever metric of better that you want to use. Someone who has words just flowing off the page, running in all the right directions to create a moving and compelling story that sweeps you off your feet and brings you along for the ride. All the feels in all the right places. Or who clearly has the attention of the fandom, racking up all the hits, kudos, and comments in their work any time it gets posted. The ones with the dedicated community of followers that are looking forward to their next release and can't get enough of it.
The published, professional authors who get to do this as a career and have made a shirt ton of money to the point where they wouldn't have to create again and they'd still have money left over after it all.
There are also often the people who seem to have made it to the heights of fame and fortune despite not possessing a bone of talent in their bodies, but often times, that's our prejudices about what's good work getting in the way of our ability to see the good stuff that's on the page. I think Ender's Game is a terrible book, but I can also see that it's a very successful power fantasy narrative for young boys steeped in a culture of toxic masculinity. The Chronicles of Narnia are a theological mess, and racist as all get out, but when not trying to make it about Lion Jesus, there's a good story and evocative descriptions of the scenery around the characters. I don't particularly like Twilight, for a lot of reasons related to the way every man in the story treats Bella, but it functions extremely well as a (relatively) sex-positive romance about a depressed young woman who eventually gets everything she wants through her own agency and determination. I might think Fifty Shades of Grey is an utter trash fire of a book, but I can thank it for spawning a lot of good and useful conversations about consent, kink, and what actually goes on in relationships with dynamics. And, even so, it's a book about someone being pampered by a wealthy person and managing to fix his mental health issues - it's a fantasy, and read that way, with full knowledge that what happens in that story has no basis in reality, is probably decent enough material for the imagination for whatever purposes people have fantasies.
Both of these ideas (that there's always someone better and there's always someone that you can't understand why they get all the accolades) can combine to produce the feeling of hopelessness. Why do the writing at all if someone else is going to be better or more statistically important and your own work is going to be not noticed at all? If there's always someone better, why try in the first place?
This is why we stared the series framing it as you already being good enough. It could have been "You are already good," but for a lot of people, even if it's true, it rings hollow, because "good" is almost always "better than me" for a lot of people. And as skill rises and taste appreciates more about the works that exist, the window of what is "good" increases as well, looking always forward about what things aren't yet achievable rather than occasionally looking back and realizing that there's been a lot of ground covered from when you first started. (As we noted then, as well, where people put their start point is usually way too far into the future compared to the actual reality of when they started doing the things that led to the creation of their work.) And sometimes, even as you're looking ahead, you might be slowly building that following and those statistical counts that point out you are quite good at what you are doing.
At a certain point, there's a good chance you'll be someone else's "always someone better." Whether in general, because your work is consumed along with everyone else's to a person that works they're never going to make it, or specifically, because you've become a respected creator in the domain you are currently in and people are in awe of what you create.
Even as I wrote that sentence, my own brain said "There's no way you're one of those people," except, of course, that I don't know that, because I can't reach into the heads of everyone whose read my work and see whether or not it's true. And this is despite the knowledge that earlier in the month,
liv, who I respect a great deal as a person and writer explicitly said "Hey, people who read me? silveradept is a person worth reading." Because brains will compartmentalize to make sure their preferred narratives don't get disrupted by such things as evidence to the contrary. Specifically, in this case, "oh, that's very clearly only about my nonfiction writing, and has nothing to do with my fiction writing, so it can't possibly be a comment on my writing skill overall." I know that we're supposed to treat ourselves in the same way that we would treat our friends if they were spouting that sort of things -- and I do treat my friends differently than myself -- but it is sometimes hard to make that leap from treating others compassionately to treating yourself compassionately. And I've been writing for years. Because it doesn't get said enough, we are all good enough. There will always be someone better, but that doesn't mean we aren't good enough as we are. And to others, there's a good chance we are the someone better. So our work is to be welcoming to those who look up to us, even as we hope those that we look up to will do the same for us. And that way, we all get better.
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Date: 2018-12-28 11:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-29 12:06 am (UTC)