Judging/Evaluating

Recently I was asked why so many books about writing tell you not to judge your work and just do your work when in fact to get to the end of a project we need to make so very many decisions. Right now for instance I am organizing some essays I’ve written over the years into book form. I’m in the process of deciding whether the beginning of a piece overlaps too much with material I’ve described in an essay I’ve placed earlier (about my father wanting to throw away a lot of family memorabilia). Surely that’s a judgment I have to make in that I have to make a decision about it. So what’s this about not judging?

For one thing, when we’re beginning a piece, say, the question of how much information belongs and how much can be deleted is best left alone until way later in the process. So at the beginning it is surely more helpful is to just get a lot of language on the page and to trust that through our many revisions we’ll be able to see what needs to be done as we respond to the words on the page. It’s tough to describe this process but it feels pretty much automatic. There’s a sense that something’s not working and then the editor self takes over and makes a change. So in fact we seem to be making judgments all the time, but perhaps it’s more germane to say we’re assessing what’s on the page against some ideal in our head and making changes that at some level we understand will benefit the piece or more accurately state our intention.

I think the easiest way to explain this business of not judging is to say that a certain kind of judging our work will likely stall our project. And I hear A lot of it from my students. “This stinks.” “The middle is a mess.” Then there are the judgments we make about the worth of the self, the writer, even though they may not sound like they’re about the self but a statement of fact. “I’m no good at this.” “I’ll never get this done.” “I don’t have time.” “I have no idea about what to do.”

I always invite the writers I work with to ask whether the statements they make are useful, whether they will aid in the composition of the work, and if the answer is “No” I exercise my teacherly prerogative and indicate that I’d like them to transform the utterance into one that gives the writer something to do.

“This stinks” clearly doesn’t help. But “This piece isn’t saying what I want it to say” does. That is, I think that in writing we need to evaluate our work in ways that give us the next thing to do with it. In the example of my work given above, it would go like this: “Reread all instances where this moment is described. Decide whether to trim or eliminate later instances and revise accordingly. Sometimes it makes sense to write the directions we give ourselves down.

In the “It stinks” example, the writer might ask him/herself to identify whatever is working and whatever isn’t. And then to take each instance of what isn’t yet working and work with it, continually asking “Precisely what doesn’t work” along the way.

A writing friend of mine is near the end of revising her book and she’s come to a chapter where there is a time shift. She’s asked herself whether she’s let the reader know enough about how she’s changed. (That’s making an important assessment of the work appropriate at this stage of the process.) Note that she didn’t say the chapter stinks or it’s no good but she stated in neutral language something she has to evaluate and decide. If she decides the reader needs more back story , then she has another job: to figure out how to do it.

So the most useful statements we can make about our work are ones that help us solve the creative challenges we ourselves have made. Then writing becomes nothing more, nothing less than creative problem solving.