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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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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.