Nerd Church - The Writer Diaries: How Do You Assess Your Own Writing?

 

Can someone tell me how to assess your own writing?

Because I am not good at judging the quality of the stuff I write!

As far as I can see, my writing falls into one of two categories: genius*, or utter [redacted].

- Sometimes both at the same time.

(And, of course, me being me, I tend to assume the latter rather than the former.)

*by 'genius' I usually mean a suprised 'huh, this is quite good, actually.'

But anyway, I can never seem to figure out what other people will think of things I write.

Stuff I think is a no-brainer, audience-wise, often gets very little traction (which is a fancy shiny way of saying 'it got three views, and one of them was me')

And then I'll stick out (i.e. post,) something that is... well, weird AF.

...Or that was, imho, not particularly good.

And people like it?

And I don't want to sound ungrateful for that! I love that people like the thing I wrote.

But it's an odd feeling when people are saying how good a poem or whatever is, and I'm like... 'I've written better poems - why is this the one people like?!'

I'm not great at taking compliments to begin with - when it's a compliment for a poem I considered passable at best, the imposter syndrome hits hard!

And then there's the other type of unexpected audience reaction - thinking I'm smarter than I actually am.

(Which is impressive since I know I'm smart - just not this smart!)

I cannot tell you how many times people, mostly on something I've posted over on Medium, but often other places too, vastly over-estimate my technical ability and general artistic intentions 😅

They're like:

[insert pretentious poetic meaning and technical terms here]

And I'm like: 

Thanks so much! I totally know what you mean, and it was entirely intentional! 😁😎😅

(Seriously, they think I a) know what a sepigram is, and b) wrote one on purpose. I did not. I wrote it entirely accidentally. 😅)

OK, this blogpost got off track...

...but I kinda love that 😉

So... how do you assess your own writing?

Talk to me! 😄💬

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Previous Writer Diaries Posts:

• Nerd Church - The Writer Diaries: Writing vs *Writing*

• Nerd Church - The Writer Diaries: The Words Need To Be Out There, Somewhere

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