There`s a hypothesis of competence that goes something like this:
- Unconscious incompetence: you not only don`t recognize how to do something, you don`t yet know enough to understand how little skill you have. I believe this relates to the Dunning-Kruger effect, where the less you know, the more potential you are to think that you are learned and competent.
In the writing realm, these are people who`ve never written any fiction (and possibly never read any) but say you how easily it is to simply sit at the computer all day and give stuff up. I`m not so concerned in them.
- Conscious incompetence: Once you actually beginning to see something, any new skill, you become painfully aware of how trivial you know, and how much there is to learn. No longer does that skill look easy, it looks impossible. As a writer, you go looking carefully at everything you understand and despairing.
- Conscious competence: You have learned the essential skills, but accept to run really difficult to give them. Every word requires care and effort.
- Unconscious competence: Mark Knopfler and Eric Clapton, if you`ll pardon me for mixing skills. The skills are so finely honed that it no longer (looks like) you get to still pay attention to them.
These aren`t absolutes. Attaining unconscious competence really just unlocks the adjacent level so you can see all the new things you are bad at that you didn`t even realize existed.
I can write. I recognize how letters go together into words, words go together into sentences, where the bits of punctuation go, how to form ideas into a logical form. (Except for quotation marks: the American scheme of putting the comma inside the quotation marks offends my programmer brain and I make to remember about it. But by and large, I`ve achieved unconscious competence at the basic mechanism of the English language.
Fiction, though. I`ve been flailing around for quite some time in the conscious incompetence stage of writing fiction. I can see all the block I can`t do, but I can`t do it, and I know there`s more lurking that I can`t yet see yet.
Viable Paradise, awesome as it was, only made this worse. Now I can see even more things I can`t do. More flailing, greater conviction that I suck as a writer of fable and will never get any better at it. As a disciple of the Red Queen, I can simultaneously acknowledge that as (probably) false and firmly believe it.
This conviction persisted despite getting to do all kinds of authorial things at WFC like signing books, doing a reading, and being horribly embarrassed to make people assure me how much they liked my zombie story. Did it once, apparently, but never again. Impostor syndrome anyone?
So. Flailing. And not acquiring any writing done. But some of it was fizzing away back there somewhere in the nooks and crannies of my brain, and this weekend I figured something out: this thing about how sentences have to act in fiction, and I`m running full-tilt toward conscious competence with it.
Not quite there yet, and it`s a blaze of a lot of work, but so much better than flailing. I get a focus now, and can see how this is/will be going. And it`s fun again.
Huh. Maybe I can do this after all.
Some writings about writing from other people for your edification:
- Terry Pratchett on writing.
- Stephen King on writing.
- James Frey: how not to follow the line of writing.
- Elizabeth Bear on the grandness of stern determination for novelists.
That last liaison was particularly helpful. I`ve never finished a novel-length study of fable and I want to show to myself that I can. My design is to finish the WIP, a YA fantasy novel, by the end of the year. It`s YA so it can be a bit shorter than an adult novel; I`m aiming for about 85k. I`m at 35k right now, but some of that will make to be thrown away.
I make a plan, and a new tool. Time to draw more tea and get support to work.