The Dunning-Kruger Threshold, or, Congratulations, You Suck

The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.

--Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

In December of 1999, Justin Kruger and David Dunning published a paper entitled Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments. In it, they described what has since become known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.

If you’ve ever seen a craptastic poet who thinks he’s some kind of genius, you’ve seen the Dunning-Kruger effect. If you’ve ever seen a brilliant artist fret over the tiny flaws in her work, you’ve also seen the Dunning-Kruger effect. The gist of the paper, as the title indicates, is that the worse you are at something, the worse you are at determining just how bad you are at it. The flip side of this is that the more skilled you become, the better you get at assessing your ability.

In the course of the original research, Kruger and Dunning also found that as people improved their skills, their ability to self-assess improved as well. What the research doesn’t mention, but many people can tell you, is how discouraging this process can be. The Dunning-Kruger Threshold is my term for the point at which you become competent enough to see just how incompetent you’ve been. You can also call it the Oh My God I Suck Moment.

Anybody who has flinched when confronted with their earlier work will know what I mean, whether it’s the cheesy spy stories you wrote after seeing that James Bond movie when you were a kid or the angsty poetry you wrote as a teenager or that first try at a novel you wrote in college. I also suspect that a certain baseline of metacognitive ability can be absorbed through the osmosis of appreciation. For example, I’ve listened to enough music to know what a guitar is supposed to sound like and that what comes out when I pick the thing up is definitely not it.

So what do you do when you’re good enough at something to realize just how bad you are? (And I mean genuinely gut-level aware, not just deliberately self-effacing in the hopes of a pat on the head and reassurance that you’re not that bad, really.) As painful as it can be, it’s an encouraging sign. It means you can see more clearly what needs to be fixed and work on advancing your abilities in order to fix it.

And if you think that everything you create is unmitigated brilliance? Be very, very worried, because that means you still have quite a long way to go.

A Random Observation About The Writing Process

. . . which probably isn't news to anybody who has written anything, but struck me as a bit amusing.

Sometimes the work bears a remarkable resemblance to doing nothing at all. Anybody who observed me over the past half hour or so would have seen me staring out the window, occasionally pulling at my hair and drinking my orange juice. Those were my physical actions. Internally, I was mulling over the possibility that an abandoned short story idea of mine may well be the seed of another novel. It's something like watching a Polaroid picture develop from hazy shapes into a detailed photograph.

I've come up with a few becauses for the whys that I've raised. I have the place figured out but I still need to determine the time, since setting it in the present day would create a very different story than setting it in the time period that the idea originally sprang from.

Maybe another NaNo, maybe something else. We'll see.

Why I've Given Up On Amazon.com

I just canceled my Amazon Prime membership.

First off, I'm not sure if the money on shipping that I was saving was that much more than what I paid for the yearly membership. It came in handy when getting birthday and Christmas presents shipped to my nieces (which is pretty much what I've been using Amazon for) but I'm still too broke to do much book shopping for myself, and I have this thing for browsing in physical bookstores anyway.

The main reason, though, is that Amazon has been acting like the 900-pound gorilla of book sales and doesn't seem to realize that it's not the only gorilla in the jungle anymore.

The standoff between Amazon and Macmillan has been documented in more detail elsewhere. John Scalzi has provided the snarkiest coverage (and is where I was first made aware of the issue) and Tobias Buckell perhaps the most detailed. Short answer for those who don't feel like clicking on links--Amazon has stopped selling Macmillan titles because Macmillan doesn't want to sell ebooks at the loss-leading price of $9.99 anymore. At last word, they had supposedly backed down from this, but the Buy Now links on Macmillan titles are still mysteriously absent.

It's possible I might feel more sympathy for Amazon versus the Big Bad Publisher if Amazon hadn't screwed up so royally previously, when they abruptly reclassified all gay-related titles as "adult" and thus excluded them from sales rankings. They did at least correct that mistake, but waved it off as a mere 'glitch' and I mentally filed Amazon under "corporations not to be trusted an inch further than they can be thrown." Now with this debacle, I think it's time to find other nice places to get my book fix. There's no rational reason to wait for Strike Three.

IndieBound is a marvelous site devoted to helping people find Real, Live, Independent Bookstores in their neighborhoods.

The Book Depository is based in the UK, but ships all over the world for free. I think I'll be hitting them up should I need a book shipped to me in future.

Meanwhile, on my other blog . . .

I sometimes wonder if I separate things out a bit much in terms of blogging, but for those of you who only follow me here, I have another blog called Wonderbink.com where I talk about free writing and the various ways I make use of it.

This marks the start of something potentially amazing. I'm not sure where it might lead. But I do know that there's no going back from it.

Whew!

Yes, I won NaNoWriMo. As of yesterday, actually. Final count: 50,114 words.

These are characters I've been noveling about, off and on, since 2005 and I think I've written about as much about them as I'm ever going to need to. I've enjoyed playing with them in my little self-indulgent way and I'll probably go back and reread the results now and again for fun. I doubt I'll be inflicting the results on anybody else, though.

Having gotten all of that out of me has had a surprising effect--I'm now contemplating no less than three different ideas for other novels. And I think I may well go ahead and get started now instead of waiting for November.

So you may be seeing a little more activity here as I sort out the possibilities.

NaNoWriMo, Day Five

Just crossed the 17,000 word threshold (17,015 to be precise) and I've still got an afternoon ahead of me. (I suspect a lot of novels will be written this month by my fellow Victims Of The Economy.)

For those of you reading who haven't cracked 10,000 yet and are feeling worried, despair not--first off, what I'm writing is so pointless and aimless I'm not even trying to get much of a plot out of it and secondly, if I can crank out 17,000 words in five days, well, so can you and you still have twenty-five days left to work with.

Permit me to offer a bit of advice for those who may be reading who are new to NaNo, which occurred to me as I was driving back from from running a few errands (and doing some obligatory writing-in-a-coffeehouse while I was out in the world with my laptop.) I live along the length of a very busy road (technically a highway) that crosses Interstate 285. As I was making my way home, I found that the traffic to get onto 285 was stacked up so badly as to slow my progress to a stop-and-start crawl. I knew that once I made it past the interstate, the going would be much smoother and it was only a short distance from where I was to my doorstep.

I refused to put myself through it, though. Instead, I ducked into a shopping center, went out the back way and took a winding series of much less crowded streets to get to my destination. It probably took about as much time as it would have if I'd sat through the logjam of traffic on the straight route. But I didn't care. I was moving, I was getting somewhere and that feels a hell of a lot better than waiting for traffic to inch its way forward. (Plus, the view was much nicer, now that the leaves are starting to turn here.)

In NaNo, you must do the same. If you find your characters need to get from A to B and the way how just isn't coming to you, send them over the long way round. Just keep moving. Throw in another character, have a sudden catastrophe happen, or even write down every little detail of the journey while your subconscious continues to gnaw on what exactly is going to happen once they arrive (which is probably what's stopping you from just getting your characters there.) But don't let the traffic jam get in your way. Just keep writing and you'll find your way there.

NaNoWriMo, Day One

I started just after midnight. Skipped the headliner at the EARL just so I could get home, fire up the laptop and get started. I even wrote some preliminary lines in my catbook as I waited at stop lights all the way home. Got a few hundred words in, went to bed, took advantage of the extra hour of sleep and then got up and wrote some more in between my usual Sunday business.

I'm at 2500 words already and I could call it a day easily, but this thing has already become an addiction--just a few more lines, a few more words, one more scene and then I'll quit. Really.

The compulsive quality is probably helped by the sheet of graph paper I'm using to visually track my word count, so I nudge myself to just a few more words to fill in just one more square and the next thing you know I've hashed out a paragraph.

It's . . . pretty crap, but I'm still enjoying writing it, and at least one or two good lines manage to slip through as I progress.

And I think I'm going to try and get just one more sentence in . . .