The importance of judgment - Compelling craft - You, the writer

Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014

The importance of judgment
Compelling craft
You, the writer

The reader’s decision mentioned in the preceding sentence leads to the important question of judgment. Like abstractions and generalizations, judgments neglect details in favor of overarching concepts. Judgments usually focus on evaluating what your writing is and what it should be. This can be quite tricky because it’s often based more on a writer’s or reader’s personal opinions and biases than on verifiable evidence. At its worst, if judgment does not accept what a piece of writing is, it cannot see how the work may be improved.

DEFINITION

A judgment is the act of evaluating if your writing is achieving its potential.

Outright negative judgments consist of sweeping generalizations: “The entire thing is crap; it’s hopeless, pointless and irrelevant; the characters are flat and uninteresting; the plot is unbelievable and trite; the language is hackneyed and cliché.” Criticism of the work often slides to scathing indictments of the writer: “I’ll never be able to do this right; I don’t have what it takes; s/he is a hack.” To top it off, negative judgment assumes that what’s wrong is so wrong, it cannot possibly be made right.

Positive judgments, while often more helpful and certainly more pleasant, have the capacity to be detrimental as well. Sometimes they make sweeping generalizations that the writing is perfect just the way it is. There’s no need to revise or improve because the work has magically achieved perfection on the first attempt. Whereas negative judgments deny the possibility of improvement, positive judgments can dissuade any need for improvement.

The challenge, then, to make your judgments useful is to focus on observations that open possibilities—that free you to explore and expand your repertoire. Ideal judgments allow you to improve your current work and develop the craft skills you need to keep growing as a creative writer.

Short-sighted judgments offer mere preliminary evaluation and then reject (as bad) or inflate (as good) based on that incomplete evaluation without ever fully seeing, understanding, and accepting what is. Useful judgments, on the other hand, simultaneously accept the work as it is and appreciate what it can be—that is, how it can be improved. This acceptance allows a discerning person to evaluate writing honestly and make effective changes.

It’s a tricky balance, but you need to find it within yourself to be both critical and accepting at the same time. It’s from such a perspective that the best improvements emerge.

The least you need to know

·  Employ your senses in your writing so your reader can, too.

·  Abstract writing favors concepts over details.

·  Generalizations in writing can be bad, unless they’re backed up.

·  Judging your writing should involve both acceptance and critique.