I remember being a judge of a fanfiction story contest a while back, the people running it picked me because they liked my fanfiction stories, because I had been published, and they thought I knew something about the art of fanfiction, so that I should be useful as a judge. I couldn't fault them for their judgment on that! I mean, yes, I know how to write. I know how to put together sentences, and I know the general structure and reason and ways in which a story should or shouldn't be.
But writing is an art, and like with my painting, my writing is all about what I choose to Make Be. It's ALL about constant judgment calls on what I want or don't want in a story or on a page. And the very same judgment that makes me a good writer is the one that made me feel like an awful judge about the relative merit of people's work. Because when I choose, I choose what I want, what I like, what I have a bias for or against.
And those biases have to be pretty strong to work 24/7. So when I judge someone else's writing, it's by those specs. By the things that I want and don't want, not simply by technical merit. I can give reasons for nearly anything I want to change, but in the end the real reason I don't like it is just that I don't like it.
I'm the kind of personality that needs to justify everything, so I've always got a list of five or twenty "reasons" why something sucked or why I loved something, but I'm kind of realizing that that's kind of a cop out and exhausting to do when I have to do it all the time. I can't do that for my painting, oddly enough. With painting, some part of my brain just turns off, the part that has to reasonably justify everything just has no sway when my visual stuff starts going, so I don't have this trouble. But with words, it's like that critical fact-gathering part gets goosed into high gear.
Just recently the Radio Lab had this fascinating study about how we choose, about how it's not nearly as often about the conscious parts of our mind as we'd like it to be. It makes it so that I think that if I really want to shut down that critical, logical part that I could just try and memorize a seven digit code while trying to make the decision and I'd always get what I gut-feel want instead of what I think I ought to have. There's a lot there that I want to delve and see, and in combination with Steven L. Macnick's Sleights of Mind, there's a huge amount of information on what can lead the mind to a conclusion that one wants.
Fascinating. *grins*
But to go back to being that judge... I guess, in the end, that if the runners of the contest really like what I wrote and wanted me to pick what I liked because they were pretty sure that they might like what I liked... *laughs* Well, then, they got what they wanted, and I'm realizing that that might be all that they were asking.
But writing is an art, and like with my painting, my writing is all about what I choose to Make Be. It's ALL about constant judgment calls on what I want or don't want in a story or on a page. And the very same judgment that makes me a good writer is the one that made me feel like an awful judge about the relative merit of people's work. Because when I choose, I choose what I want, what I like, what I have a bias for or against.
And those biases have to be pretty strong to work 24/7. So when I judge someone else's writing, it's by those specs. By the things that I want and don't want, not simply by technical merit. I can give reasons for nearly anything I want to change, but in the end the real reason I don't like it is just that I don't like it.
I'm the kind of personality that needs to justify everything, so I've always got a list of five or twenty "reasons" why something sucked or why I loved something, but I'm kind of realizing that that's kind of a cop out and exhausting to do when I have to do it all the time. I can't do that for my painting, oddly enough. With painting, some part of my brain just turns off, the part that has to reasonably justify everything just has no sway when my visual stuff starts going, so I don't have this trouble. But with words, it's like that critical fact-gathering part gets goosed into high gear.
Just recently the Radio Lab had this fascinating study about how we choose, about how it's not nearly as often about the conscious parts of our mind as we'd like it to be. It makes it so that I think that if I really want to shut down that critical, logical part that I could just try and memorize a seven digit code while trying to make the decision and I'd always get what I gut-feel want instead of what I think I ought to have. There's a lot there that I want to delve and see, and in combination with Steven L. Macnick's Sleights of Mind, there's a huge amount of information on what can lead the mind to a conclusion that one wants.
Fascinating. *grins*
But to go back to being that judge... I guess, in the end, that if the runners of the contest really like what I wrote and wanted me to pick what I liked because they were pretty sure that they might like what I liked... *laughs* Well, then, they got what they wanted, and I'm realizing that that might be all that they were asking.
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