Today,
I received good news about a paper I'd written for my recent grad school class, but for the first time in a long while, I'd been very nervous about something I'd written. It's that comfortable old dread, that sudden realization of the possibility that one has labored hard and still produced a dud. As I clicked through the university's
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Maybe the writers you're talking about, the ones who lack confidence when it comes to critique, are better writers simply because they realize there are areas in which they need to improve, while That Guy is so confident about being awesome that he doesn't bother to look. Your last paragraph demonstrates that pretty nicely. You compare your skill to your own expectations and see room for improvement. That Guy might look at his work and see perfection.
... I hope I did not just repeat what you already said. It's early and I'm tired.
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I wonder if writers don't vary somewhat on that dimension as well, and if That Guy is an extreme manifestation of it: how much it bothers me, as a writer, to have my work misunderstood or disliked by readers, and where I place the responsibility for that. If 100% of my readers missed something vital--if even 25% did--I would know I had a problem. I do wonder if Those Guys are apt to explain the same phenomenon as the readers' problem: The reader has to do the work to "get" the story rather than the writer. I don't know. I'm flying off into left field here. :)
At the other extreme are the writers who want to please everyone and angst when they don't.
I think it was very liberating for me, in a way, to realize the 10% rule, and perhaps even more importantly, to realize and accept that a certain proportion of readers wouldn't like my work. I don't want someone blasting through a 5000-word story in 15 minutes to catch the intricacies of what I'm trying to do with the piece; that would make the story far too simplistic, imho. And I certainly don't want people who have fundamentally different ethical/moral views from me to like my writing; that would mean that I'm failing in my thematic purpose (to draw on your most recent 100 Things post [which I do want to comment on, btw] ;). It can be a tough balancing act to know which critiques to listen to and to know when you have to set one aside and accept that that reader probably will just never like your work.
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