Judge, Jury, Executioner
The Entire Literary Justice System
Today I want to talk about judging your own work. And also about executing your own work. Where does the jury come in? Don’t know yet. Maybe it won’t. You will have to wait and find out; as will I.
Writers are pretty bad at judging our own work. Sometimes our work is awful but we think it is publication-ready. For example, I think exactly this two times each week. Sometimes our work is amazing but we’re sure it’s awful. And sometimes we just cannot get a read on whether the work is good in any kind of objective way.
There are a lot of different criteria by which a piece of writing might be judged successful. For instance:
Did it entertain its reader?
Did it enlighten or educate its reader?
Was it written skillfully, using established literary best practices? Or, contrariwise,
Did it break new storytelling ground in the way it was written?
All of those things are, frankly, very hard to judge in one’s own work. You can write something with the intention of entertaining or educating your reader but beauty is in the eye of the beholder; whether they are entertained or educated is not within your control. Likewise, it’s hard to say you’ve got something technically well-wrought or revolutionary on your hands without help from others.
Writers who are experienced at selling their writing develop a sense of whether or not something they have written is salable; at least, several people have told me this. But even so, you might find yourself in a position of knowing something has commercial value and still doubting whether it’s any good.
Today I bring you a foolproof means to evaluate your own writing but first an anecdote about Dolly Parton because obviously.
When I was much younger than I am now and, regrettably, had not yet come into my full appreciation of Dolly Parton, I went with my family to visit Dollywood in Sevierville. At the time I was pretty critical about the idea of someone having built an entire theme park in their own honor; I did not understand at the time how many high-paying jobs the park provided for the economically depressed area.
Anyway, we saw some likeness of Dolly herself and I don’t recall whether it was a photo, a painting, a cartoon of her, or perhaps an animatronic Dolly. This was a long time ago. And I said: “I don’t know why she wears her hair like that, it looks ridiculous.” (I would never!!! say an unkind word about Dolly Parton today.)
And my stepmother said, “First of all, that’s not her hair. And second of all, she looks how she thinks she should look.”
That struck a chord for me and I have always remembered it. Dolly Parton doesn’t look how nineteen-year-old Catherine thought she should look or how anyone else thinks she should look, she looks how she wants to look. I have remembered this many times when people, usually men, have told me things like:
I don’t like short hair on women.
I don’t like it when women have tattoos.
I don’t like it when women wear so much makeup.
Listen if I had a nickel for every time a man has told me he prefers long hair on women, I could buy something off the dollar menu at McDonalds. I know that doesn’t sound like much but that means it’s happened at least twenty times.
“I think women should have long hair.”
“Okay well I think men should keep their opinions to themselves.”
My hairstyle, makeup, and tattoos are a reflection of how I want to look and not an attempt to make myself look how some rando thinks I should look based on my uneducated guess about what he might think women should look like. The way I judge the way I look is not based on how anyone else will perceive me but it’s based on
How faithfully I was able to execute the vision I had for how I would look.
I indented that because it’s important. The way I evaluate my appearance on any given day is by how closely I replicated my vision for how I would look. If I had in mind that I was going to wear a certain outfit, with certain accessories, and do my makeup a certain way, and wear a certain nail color, and style my hair a certain way—I judge my execution of that vision.
I don’t look in the mirror and judge my appearance and say, “Oh, but I’m chubby.” The chubbiness is immaterial. That is not part of my execution (and it probably was part of the vision). I don’t have a vision of being, for instance, taller than I am, or slimmer, or being different in some way fundamentally than how I actually am. My vision is about style and that’s what I execute on and then that’s what I evaluate.
This is true of writing as well. I can’t read my own writing and know if it’s going to entertain someone else or if a reader or editor will think it’s “good” or even “amazing”; but I can evaluate the finished work based on how closely it adheres to my original vision for this piece.
For a long time I did not realize I wasn’t alone in this. I won’t say “I thought I was alone” because I guess I didn’t think much about whether other people experienced this phenomenon. But I had never known anyone else to say they had, so I didn’t realize it was a common thing. I would have an idea for a story and I would plan and then write that story but the story I ended up with never lived up to the original vision I had for it in my head when I started.
Then I saw a tweet from John Wiswell (@Wiswell), which I can no longer locate (it may have been deleted, or may have been a reply to something else, or maybe I hallucinated everything) that said something to the effect of, “words on the page are never as good as the words in your head.” When I read that, I felt like I was in good company (and it seems several other people who interacted with the same tweet did, too).
So, it’s not unusual that a written work doesn’t measure up 100 percent to the vision the writer had for it. Maybe that’s not true for everyone; maybe some people’s writing flows onto the page exactly as it was in their head, with all the beauty and nuance. But for a lot of people that does not happen.
Then, it’s a matter of judging and executing.
First, judge how close you were able to come to your original vision. To help me keep the original vision of each piece clear in my head, I usually make a paragraph or two of notes when I first conceive the idea for a story. These notes include the plot and characters as I understand them at that early stage but also the mood I want to evoke, the tone I want to set, the narrative voice, and the overall feeling of the piece. I’ll also sometimes reference other short stories I’ve read that have a similar mood or feel to the one I want to write so I can reread those and study them a bit.
Usually I don’t start working on a draft right away. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll flesh out the idea and add to my notes until I have a good understanding of the whole story and exactly what I want from the finished piece. Then, it’s time to sit down and write.
The first draft of any fiction I write is pretty bad. Partly this is because I over-write—I write way too much. I always have a lot of text to cut before I get close to what I want in a second, third, or fourth draft. This works well for me to get execute all the aspects of my original vision, though, because by the time I start I have a lot of notes and they all need to be incorporated. There will be specific scenes or elements that need to go in, specific bits of dialogue I knew about ahead of time, and all the things that will help make up the mood or the tone of the finished piece.
After I have the first draft down in all its messy glory, then it’s time to execute. I mean this in the sense of like stretch-your-neck-on-the-chopping-block execution, because a lot of text goes on the chopping block for me and has to be executed and sent away to the boneyard (the boneyard is another Google doc where I save things I’ve clipped out). But I also mean this is the part where I fine tune the piece to execute my original vision. This is where I take out the parts that don’t contribute to the vision so the parts that do contribute to the vision can stand out.
Revision ends when I am able to say, “this is as close as I can get the manuscript to my vision for this story.” I’ve been asked before how do I know when to stop revising and call a piece “done”—that’s it. There will always be little changes and tweaks I could keep on making forever, but I have to call it finished at some point and stop messing around with it.
Truthfully, I do sometimes make those tweaks when something rejects on sub and before I send it out again. I spent weeks obsessing about a manuscript one time cause I sent it out with the word “rival” and five minutes later realized “frenemy” would have been better.
Done isn’t when there are no further changes that I could make (because that point never arrives). Done is when I feel I’ve executed my vision to the best of my ability and any further changes that I make would be superficial and would not bring the story any closer to my vision for it. That’s when I call it a day. Like right now.
I never brought it around to discussing jury. Guess that means jury’s out.
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