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OK, all you creative types out there, I have a question...
The other day in class, I said to the class that one of the issues with a writer's own creative work is that a writer can't ever read his/her own work in the same way one might read the work of someone else. You can never read it 'cold,' never read it without the ghosts and shadows of your original concept obscuring it, without seeing all the drafts and revisions it's gone through, and without what you think it says as opposed to what might actually be there in the words. It's nearly impossible to get that kind of objective distance from your own work, and therefore it's difficult for a writer to know how their work compares to anyone else's.
I started to say all that, but I stopped halfway through. "Y'know," I told the students, "let me amend that statement. That is my experience, and I'm only speaking for myself. I really don't know how other writers actually feel. Maybe other writers feel they can read their work in the same critical way they'd read another writer's work, with the same objectivity and distance. Or maybe some of them can't do it with newer work, but can with their old work even though for me it doesn't work that way, no matter how ancient the work is. Maybe it's just me who has this difficulty."
So... there's the question for you writers out there. Can you read your own work without the overlay of the process of conceiving of and writing that story? Can you read your work and respond to it in exactly the same way you'd read the work of a stranger? Can you read it the way you read a story the very first time?
Or as a writers do we all have this different and far more intimate relationship with our work that prevents us from being entirely objective about it?
What do you think? I'm curious to know.
The other day in class, I said to the class that one of the issues with a writer's own creative work is that a writer can't ever read his/her own work in the same way one might read the work of someone else. You can never read it 'cold,' never read it without the ghosts and shadows of your original concept obscuring it, without seeing all the drafts and revisions it's gone through, and without what you think it says as opposed to what might actually be there in the words. It's nearly impossible to get that kind of objective distance from your own work, and therefore it's difficult for a writer to know how their work compares to anyone else's.
I started to say all that, but I stopped halfway through. "Y'know," I told the students, "let me amend that statement. That is my experience, and I'm only speaking for myself. I really don't know how other writers actually feel. Maybe other writers feel they can read their work in the same critical way they'd read another writer's work, with the same objectivity and distance. Or maybe some of them can't do it with newer work, but can with their old work even though for me it doesn't work that way, no matter how ancient the work is. Maybe it's just me who has this difficulty."
So... there's the question for you writers out there. Can you read your own work without the overlay of the process of conceiving of and writing that story? Can you read your work and respond to it in exactly the same way you'd read the work of a stranger? Can you read it the way you read a story the very first time?
Or as a writers do we all have this different and far more intimate relationship with our work that prevents us from being entirely objective about it?
What do you think? I'm curious to know.
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Maybe decades later, but that's different.
B
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This typically applies to things I wrote more than ten (maybe even 20) years ago, and either never finished or immediately trunked. Basically, stuff that never stayed top of mind, or even middle of mind. I have no memory of writing it, no memory of having thought of it, even. I think this comes of being a prolific young writer and not submitting anything until I was much older.
I don't tend to forget anything I work on more than one session, basically.
I figured out what you're saying when I was sixteen, and was writing monologues for the local young person's theater group. Other people had absolutely no trouble performing my monologues. I couldn't reliably perform mine, because memorizing the final draft was so hard--because the ghosts of all the former drafts came up. All the time. I don't think I ever performed the same monologue twice.
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I have occasionally been looking for something specific on usenet, and reading an old thread to find it, and found something in that thread that I wrote and had totally forgotten about, and read without realising I wrote it, and thought "Yes! How well put! I totally agree! Oh... right... me." I think this is the only time.
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It Depends
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Ghosts, I banish they with the Rusty Sword of Forgetfulness the Brittle Chain of Fustiness and the Elusive Butterfly of Maturity.
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I've critiqued hundreds of stories for others and can just read and critique, but when I read my own work, there's too much that gets in the way-- uncompleted story lines, back-story, changes made, changes yet to make, und so weiter...
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I think I've come close with things I wrote years and years and years ago -- like, when I was twelve -- but even then, after a few pages I start to remember the genesis of the idea, and the cold read evaporates.
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I am guessing from both my and B's reply that your premise applies equally to non-fiction (since all of my published work is non-fiction, as is, I believe, all/most of his).
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I find public reception and knowing how well a piece has aged makes a big difference to this.
So here's a question back: Does knowing the long-term quality/tenor of the audience response to your work color how you yourself view it on re-reading?
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B
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But mostly for my early stuff, where I was too inexperienced to judge its value on my own.
Also for things that have had impact beyond what I hoped for, even if they weren't my best work.
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K.
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B
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B
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Except maybe with barbecue sauce.
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My input
I can be reasonably objective after I've pretty much forgotten what I've written, and that can be as little as a week or as much as a year. I also use and apply a set of standards to each writing piece to make sure I don't miss anything, to maintain a high level of quality and consistency.
I also tell my clients that one of most effective ways to catch errors in your own work is to read it backwards. It's painful and it works (and is not for longer pieces, you'd go nuts.)
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I can, but I have to consciously put on the objective hat and work at it for the first little while. It probably helps that I have the memory of a squash and occasionally run into whole chunks of prose I don't remember having written. Occasionally in the book I'm currently writing... *g*
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Secondly, I think that you'll find that artists in general don't look upon their own work in the same light as they do others. I've found that actors, painters, photographers, writers all suffer from one degree or another from the same malaise that does not allow them to view their own work with dispassion.
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1. I cmoe closer with older work than with recent stuff, and
2. It's more like re-reading the work of a stranger.
My own stuff can never be like the first read of someone else's stuff. On a first read, it's all full of surprises (if good). The tensions will be at maximum effect. I can have guesses what happens next, but never really be sure.
My own stuff...nope, can't happen. But that is also true of books by others on second or later reads. I can never again be as tortured by the chess game in Vol. 4 of Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles. Bujold's kitten-tree in Cetaganda is still as ooky as ever, but no longer can catch me by surprise and upset me in quite the same way when the kitten-flower dies.
But that has its advantages. In rereading good books, I can see where anauthor laid the seeds of foreshadowing, or how he put together layers of worldbuilding, or how she managed to keep multiple plots running simultaneously until they all come together in the end. (Or, conversely, where an inconsistency occurs, or a difference of flavor between the beginning of a book and the ending.)
And in reading over my own work, I can achieve that kind of distance, the distance of reading something I've read before, and see where my structure is falling apart or succeeding; where my characters are being consistent or not; where my plots are getting too tangled and need combing, or possibly need a hairpiece because they're actually too thin (ha. never happens).
So in that sense...I think I am capable of achieving objectivity, but I learned it by analyzing the crap out of a lot of books by other people.
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