Many Self-Proclaimed Writers are Downright Delusional

Your writing is not special, and you do need to learn the rules.

Recently, in a writing group I participate in, a woman was upset because a poem that she says she really “poured [herself] into” lost a contest to a poem she says, “made no sense to [her] personally.”

For this contest, all entries are publicly available, so I decided to go find hers. I took one look at it, and it was clear not only why she lost, but why the judges likely didn’t even read to the end before discounting it: because she’d written an essay, not a poem.

It’s not even up for debate. There’s no chance it would have passed as a poem. It had paragraphs, all with complete sentences. There was no imagery in it and no poetic language, no meter, no playing with space. If you polled people, I’d estimate that 95% of people would call it an essay, and the rest are just messing with you.

Now, look. I understand that writing is subjective, and if you want to call your essay “a poem,” that’s up to you. You can call it a cheesecake if you feel like it. Just don’t expect anyone else to want to serve it for dessert.

And the poem that won? It wasn’t hard to follow at all. If it “made no sense” to her, it was because she’s incapable of deriving meaning from anything without it being lain out explicitly. Which might explain why she wrote a straight-up essay.

She could have turned her essay into something that would pass for a poem. A poem that would give people chills? Certainly not. But at least something folks would easily identify as a poem. I’ll prove it:

She could have turned her essay into something that would pass for a poem. A good poem? That would give people chills? Certainly not. But at least something folks would easily identify as a poem.

See? She was either unwilling or unable to understand why to write this way. Which, you know, lots of people don’t understand. Poetry has got to be the most hated genre of writing, mostly because it asks a lot of the readers, but also because it’s so short, it attracts a lot of amateurs and amateur writing tends to be intolerable to read. I suck at poetry, and except for this one incredibly flawed poem of mine, have none available to read online.

Because I’m not delusional.

The Rules Apply to You

It’s part of the delusional nature of so many wannabe writers that they think they can write any style without looking into the conventions of that style. The idea that there are no rules when it comes to writing is attractive to anyone who doesn’t wish to do the work of learning the rules.

Every genre has rules and expectations. Abiding them won’t make your work turn out identically to other people’s work. Those genre expectations formed naturally, as part of a human’s intrinsic understanding of story, to satisfy our thirst for narrative.

Should you subvert expectations? Probably, yes. The trick, when it comes to writing, is to simultaneously have what happens in the story feel both inevitable and surprising. You can do that only if you understand your genre completely. Then you can find a way to both fulfill and subvert expectations.

Too many writers believe they don’t have to figure out their genre’s conventions. They don’t have to read, they don’t have to learn grammar, they don’t have to improve their prose, they don’t have to learn anything at all. They’re brilliant just the way they are.

And that’s fine. But they’ll fail at getting people to finish reading their work.

The woman in the writing group is not alone. Almost all self-proclaimed writers have suffered from the delusion that our writing is better than it is. Certainly, I have. This vanity tends to only go away after we’ve been shot down by submission rejections and contest losses a couple of times.

After that, there are three types of people: those who keep working on improving, those who decide that no one “gets them” or can “appreciate their work” but keep writing anyway to no audience, and those who quit writing altogether.

The Support Trap

Living in the internet age has likely increased wannabe writers’ delusions, in part because of what I call “The Support Trap.”

In writer message boards and groups, there are always people who insist that every internet space for writers is “a support group,” and that “being supportive” means never offering up useful critique such as, “Perhaps the reason you lost a poetry contest is that you submitted an essay.”

Even if you put it in a compliment sandwich (“Awww, I loved it, it was very sweet and I loved hearing about your uncle. I was confused, though, because I thought it was supposed to be a poem, but it’s an essay. Still, it was really interesting and I wish I’d had an uncle like that!”) you’re still likely to get an angry response asking what you meant by saying it wasn’t a poem, then get accused of not being “supportive.”

What others think of as “support,” I think of as counterproductive coddling. I am all for the compliment sandwich method, but even that rarely goes over well, because delusional writers don’t want to improve. They think they’re amazing and you just don’t understand them.

The best writers I know personally are all great at listening to and weighing suggestions. I’ve watched people go from showing some promise to crafting incredible work within only a couple of months after they took the critique of their work seriously and learned from it.

I’ve been lucky to have had access to very high-level critique — from literary magazine submission editors, from an editor I pay who is the best ever, from a popular published author my stepmother is friends with, as well as from talented writers I’ve met in writing groups.

As a result, I’ve gone from having a little promise to having… ummm… maybe a little more promise. I let my delusions about my abilities go and am constantly searching for ways to improve. As a result, I’ve gotten work accepted into a few literary magazines, and maybe as I improve more, I’ll have further writing success.

If you want to be a good or great writer, I suggest you do the same.

Personally, I don’t take any fiction writing advice seriously from people who don’t make their fiction writing available to read. You can find mine here — scroll down, it’s toward the bottom: