unconscious competence

I was at a writers' event recently where an author spoke about the process she'd been involved in to get to where she is today: two published novels, one of which was shortlisted for the Saltire First Book of the Year Award; runner up in the MacAllan/Scotland on Sunday Short Story competition; published poet, and now in the midst of writing a trilogy.  Afterwards, at the question section, I asked how she went about undertaking revision of her work -  a process widely regarded as hard graft.  Did she have lists of things to check for or did she read and make changes?  Her answer was simple: she read through the draft checking for aspects of plot: what questions would the reader have?

This left me wondering about my comprehensive, virtually exhaustive lists of things to check that I used for my last novel and am currently using for revisiting an earlier one.  Am I a nerd?  Do I make too much of the process of revision?  I've blogged before about the sort of things I check for.  When I mentioned this to my mentor, she later confessed as to wondering where the book was:  she could visualise the laptop, the long, long list, but not the story.  I knew where it was, however: on my laptop, being chiselled.  

This brings me to a subject I have written about before: competence: unconscious or not.  The guest speaker the other night has obviously reached the level of unconscious competence.  She checks for the all important structure of plot.  Whereas I have to check everything.  Yes: everything.  If I'm a nerd, well, I have to accept this.  The commonsense attitude is, of course: does it work for me?  It does.  It's exhausting, tedious, often boring.  I need to take frequent breaks.  But when I've finally finished editing a chapter, I know I have a stronger piece of writing.

I had an example of this the other day. I was walking to the Melting Pot, bracing myself for work on an emetic of a chapter, if there ever was one.  I had no idea where to start.  It was possible that the 5000 odd words would have to be ditched and the chapter completely rewritten.  I searched through my list, found one thing which was easy to check for, made some changes.  Found another thing to check, and so on.  Twenty four hours later -  not an unbroken stretch of work, I should add -  the chapter was finished and significantly improved.





I realise that for many aspects of writing, I am stuck at the stage of conscious competence.  This means that I have to work diligently at the changes I know need doing.  There are some aspects where I am even further down the competence paradigm - at the conscious incompetence level.  But I can identify some things that I automatically do in my writing that I wouldn't have done ten years ago.  Similarly, things I would have done in the past that I wouldn't do now.  One of the difficulties is that there is no one correct way to write.  There are guidelines, all of which make sense.  But a great book can be filled with 'mistakes'.  If the story is strong enough, authors will be forgiven some inadequacies of technique.  J.K. Rowling is a classic example.  Many people criticise her writing but, as everyone knows, she's been a colossal success with her Harry Potter books.  For us lesser mortals, we need to keep working hard.

Becoming a better writer is a journey, a process, with no definitive destination.  I suppose that in the same way that an actor is expected to feel nervous beforehand in order to perform well, if a writer gets to a stage where they feel they know everything about the craft, this will adversely affect their writing.

Any comments welcome.

For a good blog on editing, check out: http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2010/03/revising-and-editing-building-the-orient-express.html

Jane