Sheila Rambles

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 ...

. . . 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.