How practise so often makes (far from) perfect
Words & images © Paul Ransom
No.
For most artists – indeed for the vast majority striving for something beside a treadmill – this is a word we get used to. Sometimes we hear it directly, in the form of rejection, but often we are left to intuit it by dint of silence.
Now, at 60, I have a decades long back catalogue of no. As a writer with multiple manuscript rejections – some many times over – I submit work with little expectation. Or rather, expecting the chance of yes to be tiny. Make that, miniscule.
Thus, despite a smattering of wins, I have toiled at the typewriter since childhood for a grand total of zero acclaim, single figure audience numbers, and residual earnings in the tens of dollars.
The usual reflex for creatives & co is to resort to self-validating balms, ranging from delusions of genius and/or sacred purpose to less egotistical variants like process-over-outcome. Across the years, I have tried them all on.
However, when a publisher who had previously accepted two of my manuscripts recently ‘declined’ a third, I was prompted to stop. Reflect. I had been reasonably confident. The odds, I surmised, were better than lottery. After all, he had invited me to submit. But no.
Though I will confess to a few hours of deep hurt and shock, what jumped out was more profound. I kept thinking: Dunning-Kruger Effect1. Was I, like so many others, suffering from an illusory superiority bias? Had I simply overestimated my competence? Maybe, despite thousands of hours of practise over half a century, I had no special talent.
The common denominator in this long history of knock-backs is me.
This is why I have elected not to write about it. Rather, I have looked to the bench, and substituted my unengaging wordsmithery for the quicker, more palatable video version below.
(NB: Should you bother with said video you will shortly discover another example of my crushing over-confidence. I had mistakenly believed that I could successfully embed a You Tube video, but the measureable result – vid weirdly starts half way through – proves otherwise. Dunning-Kruger? QED.)
Even if the video above is as poorly executed as the massed tonnage of my words – and likewise fails to find an audience – I remain curiously undeterred. More than that, almost giddy with a sense of freedom. True, I could be seriously deluded, yet my ego is uninjured. Why? Because my self-esteem is not dependent on being considered ‘good’. Nor is the joy of creating gravitationally bound to notions of talent.
So, what if I remain a talentless hack still kidding himself he’s an artist? Okay, great. Click away now. I won’t be offended. In fact, I won’t even notice. And we can all ignore each other, and carry on being ordinary dreamers who imagine themselves as special…yet are not.
Here perhaps, we should offer profound thanks, for the ordinary is a window to great beauty.
PS: Elsewhere on this site I have opined on related themes. Feel free to ignore the following.
Surrender the need for success
1: The Dunning-Kruger Effect, which was formally identified/quantified in the late 1990s, is a specific cognitive bias, whereby people falsely estimate their competence in certain areas of expertise. In short, the disconnect arises when self-assessment is measured against observable performance.
As If You Were Listening 
Hey Paul. I had to make a response to this one. Forgive me because I am a bit drunk and I tend to over-estimate my abilities in this state. However I am also 60 and I have had similar ruminations. I want to say two things. One is that a great deal depends upon what you set out to do in the first place, and what the alternative might have been.
We wrote a novel in grade 9 (or was it 10? … it was so long ago I can’t remember). It was not the best novel in the world, but that was never the goal. We learned that it could be done! At that age. How many people have achieved that so early? Perhaps it was foolish. Perhaps we should have had some life experience first. But damn it felt good to finish it. If that was a waste of time, why did it feel so good?
I wanted to be a great philosopher, but in fact I am pretty ordinary. That doesn’t make me sad because the alternative history, which is that I never even bothered trying to do what I actually enjoy, is far worse. That would have made me miserable, possibly suicidal, and definitely out of touch with my own desire, my own self. Despite the collapse of my academic career, I don’t believe I wasted my time and energy on something that ultimately failed. I was not as successful as others, some of whom I regard as incompetent, but that doesn’t bother me much. The work itself, or as you say the process, is more important. To be engaged, to be inspired, to love the creative act, that is the reward. The alternative is to settle for boredom, and the disgusted feeling that one never even tried. We have to live with ourselves and our choices.
The second thing I want to say will sound a bit fussy, but in my drunken state it seems relevant. It is just that the Dunning-Kruger effect is not the best explanation for what has happened. It is a cognitive bias that some people have with respect to their intelligence, not their creativity. The idea is that “The stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.” The very fact that you are ruminating about the Dunning-Kruger effect is proof that you do not suffer from it. Intelligent people like you and I are often full of doubt because the world is complicated and we can see that our opinions might be false. This applies to knowledge, factual matters and assertions. It does not apply to novelists who try to create literature, nor to philosophers who try to work out why there is something instead of nothing. These are not cases of confidently believing that you know something and actually being wrong about it.
I can understand that you are feeling bad about a rejection. I just don’t think that means you suck at writing.
Love, Arthur
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Thanks for that, Arthur – and yes, I concur. The process, the trying, is the locus of joy and meaning, etc. Likewise, I realise I do not suffer (that much) from Dunning-Kruger. However, I do feel that for a sense of perspective, and as a bulwark against a range of possible conceits, it is worth considering the possibility that we may not be as talented as we think/wish. Oh, and btw, the latest rejection has not even put a dent in my desire to make work. I think we are both too old to let such knock-backs being anything more than a minor scratch.
Thanks for the drunken solidarity; and for that formative Year 10(?) novel writing experience.
P
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