Young Writers Society

When I was a wee smaurling, and dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I had an epiphany.

I am NOT going to be the best writer of my time.

More importantly — I don't want to be.

For those of you who clued into this when you first started writing, let me explain how utterly screwed up it was for me. I compared myself to everyone. Or rather, I compared everyone to me. I scrutinized phrases, picked at word choices, obsessed over dialogue — in my head, I devised charts and Venn diagrams and probably wrote a few scientific formulas to explain the phenomena. I agonized over brilliant writers for days, months, weeks — how would I beat them at their own game? How could I bestow pearls of wisdom to rival theirs? How could I write dialogue of such quality, recapture their rapier wit, rival their New York Times bestsellers? How could I garner such captivated audiences and rabid fanbases? Would people stay up all night to read my books by flashlight? Would I ever have 500 fanfiction archives built in my honour?

How would I get that good? How could I beat the writers I loved? I read books by Ray Bradbury and L. M. Montgomery, sighing at the realization that I was not that brilliant, that talented or witty or downright awesome.

I think I was reading fanfiction (note: epiphanies always strike you when you read fanfiction) when it hit me. I'm a reader, first and foremost — I love reading to the point of no return, and I have the long-winded and occasionally embarrassing anecdotes to prove it. Finding an awesome writer that I've never read is like hitting the jackpot. It's like hitting the jackpot twice. And being the best writer on the face of the earth would absolutely suck, because then who do you look up to? If everyone's writing is comparatively lamer than yours, how do you enjoy reading?

Like I said, first and foremost I am a reader, which is to say that I loved reading before I loved writing, and my love for writing evolved because it just seemed like the natural thing to do at the time. If someone held a fork to my eye (no, seriously, a fork to the eye is kinda scary) and forced me to choose between reading and writing, I'd choose reading any day. Not because I don't love writing, because I do — I love it deeply and desperately to infinity and beyond, and possibly write embarrassing love poetry to it in my spare time*. But I devour stories with a spoon and a side dish of salad, and I love doing it. I love character dynamic and the intricacies of plot and the layers of storytelling, and I've been reading for a heck of a longer time than I've been writing.

Being the best writer in the world means that I'd inevitably become pretty bored of reading, and I can't even begin to tell you how much that would suck. But on top of that — you get better by learning from the best. (You also get better by learning from the worst, but that's beside the point.) When you become the best, there's room for improvement, but only to a limited extent. It's like trapping yourself in a small box without holes, where there's no air to breathe and no room to move. From such a high vantage, the only place to go is down, right?

It's not about copping out, or settling for less. It's about accepting your limitations and beating down your strange psychotic paranoia. For me, shooting towards an unreachable goal would be disastrous. Armed with the knowledge that I won't be the best writer in the universe gives me license to suck at writing.

Mind you, it doesn't give me the license to continue being a bad writer. Just because I don't want to be the best writer on the face of the universe and/or time-space continuum doesn't mean that I shouldn't try to become better. Instead of worrying that Writer X churns out better prose in his SLEEP than I'll ever write, instead of comparing myself to everyone in the universe, I can sit back and enjoy the ride. Accepting the fact that Writers X, Y, and Z are all better than me, and that I'm glad that they are, is fundamental. I don't have that looming over my head with every word I type. Which leaves me to focus on those lovely things like subplot and character development and other nifty story-related devices. It lets me enjoy the writing process. It lets me enjoy watching myself improve and grow as a writer.

It's not about being the best; it's about getting better.




* I don't. No, really. I don't.

So true!

Very nice post, smaur. For a while when I first started writing seriously (I guess ninth grade-ish, so yeah, I'm kind of new to all this) I would be so disappointed when I read something written by someone better than me. I just knew I could never be that good, even if I got a brain transplant and raised my IQ twelve bazillion points.

But then (kind of happened gradually), I stopped caring that other people were so much better than me, because being at the top with no where else to go would be slightly depressing. Which is why it's really good I have people like you! Life's good.

Hahaha... you so totally write angsty love poems. About woe. And jack rabbits.

But that's besides the point.

Yeah. I always loved reading. But I think I'm more into nonfiction now, which is really sad, but whatever. O_o

But being the best is over-rated. It's getting better which is awesome.

Who is this Venn, and what's with his diagrams?

Too true, too true. Erm... what they said...