The Eye, the Hand, and the Mind

Huddle 'round, grasshoppers, says Zen Thorn, and let's talk about improving technique!

(Actually, Zen Thorn really wanted a treat and was attempting to mind control me. But let's go forward with the other topic; I'm not quite ready to talk about canine mind control. Yet.)

This week I sent out a new short story. It seems that the answer to being sick of editing my novel is to switch focus for a couple weeks. Which is not good, in that I need to get more done on the novel, but also good, because it helps me to internalize the techniques I'll use to make my novel better by practicing them on the short fiction.

I will admit that when I think about what this story put me through, and then consider that my novel is equivalent to TWENTY of those, the wisdom tooth surgery I have coming up next week looks paltry in comparison.

But I digress…

I talk about the relationship between art and writing a lot on here, and this is no exception. Long story short (hah!), there are always times in my writing where it feels like I'm pushing a boulder up a mountain. This time it felt like the mountain fell on me.

I despaired. I went from really feeling (in the early stages) like this might be the best thing I'd written so far, to raging and gnashing my teeth because I just could NOT see my way through editing the second part of the story. I knew it was flawed, and it drove me crazy because I couldn't see how to fix it.

Essentially, my Eye had progressed to the point where I knew something was wrong. But my Hand (or in this case, my Mind) wasn't yet at the same level as my Eye.

This is very similar to what happens in learning to paint, or draw, or attempt any other human pursuit of excellence, if you believe the Conscious Competence Ladder.

I think most of us have seen the Conscious Competence Ladder, yet I always manage to conveniently forget it exists when I'm in the middle of a funk where reminding myself that No, Anne, You Are Not Alone might help. Essentially the theory goes that there are four stages of competence:

1. Unconscious Incompetence, also called You Are Clueless And Don't Know It Yet, also called "Blissful Ignorance". You try something new and you are delighted. In painting, this is the "Hey! I painted something! Neato!" stage. In NaNoWriMo this is called the "YAY I Finished a NOVEL!" stage. It is followed by:

2. The Conscious Incompetence stage, which is what I hit on this story. Your eye has gotten better (usually through looking at the work of people better than you), and suddenly errors in your work glare out at you because your hand or mind hasn't caught up yet. Also called the "Oh God I Suck" stage. Or the "OMG EDITING?!?" stage. Or the "Have a Beer" stage…maybe that's just me.

But there's hope! Don’t quit! In my case, I had a beer. I played with my dogs. I slept on it, and I read a couple of excellent writing books (pretty much anything by Donald Maass, at this stage in my writing development) to try to troubleshoot.

In other words, I didn't give up. And when I realized what my problem was, I groaned. I had fallen victim to "Don't Tell Me About Your Character"-itis (hereby shortened to DTMAYC-itis, though you can substitute "world" for "character").

I'll make another post about this, maybe, but suffice to say that I had fallen into giving way too much information about the world and how it worked. This caused the story to feel slow, awkward, and contrived, because you shouldn't give away any information for free and then not until there's a reason for your audience to really want to know it. When I realized this, I couldn't believe that I'd done it. The solution was to step back and ask myself "What is the STORY about here?" Once I cut out all the goop and got back to the real essence of the story, the issue fixed itself.

BUT! The important thing to take away from this, other than to not ask people about their RPG characters (or tell them about yours), is that I had entered Stage Three, which is:

3. Conscious Competence! This is the "Ugh This Hurts" stage, in which you must THINK about what you are fixing, understand it, and OWN that bugger. This is the work part, where you train your hand and mind to catch up with your eye. I will never again fall victim to DTWAYC-itis. I recognize it now, and so I will be able to avoid it entirely or troubleshoot it effortlessly next time, thus leading to:

4. Unconscious Competence, where you live in a world of magic and rainbows (or, if you are a horror writer, perhaps evil cars and scary clown-people). This is the mindset where you're not sure why your stuff is coming out so well, it just does. It seems natural to you. This is what everyone aims for. Your eye spots issues, your mind knows how to fix them, your hand puts them down on the page. Maybe not effortless, but not like pushing a boulder up a mountain.

I have a theory that in complicated endeavors like art and writing, you hit steps one through four again every time you hit a new type of problem. This can make you want to hurt people, or to give up, or to make yourself another martini. But you should do none of these! Think on it: If you screw up in enough different ways, and learn to fix your screw-ups, and own them, then you will hit Unconscious Competence in EVERYTHING!

You can be brilliant in every aspect of your chosen field that matters to you enough for you to have screwed it up and fixed it. But the only way to get there is to get out and DO it. Draw. Program. Sculpt. Write. Don't quit.

Get out there and screw up!