Had our first day of workshops today in my creative writing class. It was pretty fun, even if I somehow managed to over-and-under-prepare. Over the course of our speed-dating work shopping, though, I noticed that I was having a similar problem to something that happened to me with mentoring in Video Game I Play. Above a certain threshold of execution, I stop having useful kinds of comments.

There are probably a few possible reasons for this, but the one I think I figured out today after talking to my professor about it a bit, is that above a threshold of execution, people stop making, well, execution errors (To clarify here, I am not talking about proficiency at murder, I mean proficiency at a given task or field). And that once people stop making execution errors, it becomes a lot more about craft and philosophy. In other words, the problems go from the surface level of just doing stuff plain wrong, and more about, like, why did you do it like this?

By pure happenstance, I had another weird thing happen this morning at work. We had a pretty big day of orders to go out, and a lot of eggs that had to go in all of those orders. A lot more than usual, so we were extra careful while packing them to make sure that we wouldn’t have to go back over our stuff and find the missing eggs. Of course, there was still a huge fuckup and we ended up with like 10 more cartons of eggs leftover than we should have, and so then we spent the next hour and a half checking, rechecking, not trusting the computer, not trusting our eyes, and just generally wasting a lot of time and being really, really confused.

Eventually, we figured it out (one order got double counted on the total due to a clerical error) and my boss said, “It’s truly never the system (sic).” Meaning, it was never the failure of the computer itself, but rather always the failure of the monkeys pushing the buttons. I replied, “For real man, it’s garbage in, garbage out.” Referring to the old adage of computer science, of course.

And I think it really is the same way in Video Game I Play and writing, and probably every other endeavor for which critique can be done (meaning every endeavor ever, period.).

I need to tread carefully here, of course, lest the modern artists be roused from their money-comas into ranting about gatekeeping art (this being particularly funny noting my own recent work). It is certainly the case that for a possible subset of art, you lose nothing by totally disregarding skill expression as an avenue of critique. But there is also a lot of art that is in large part expressive of skill (and I would argue then, also, passion). So let’s go ahead and disregard art that is not primarily expressive of skill at some particular medium as totally immune to this criticism by definition and move on. (There is nothing to argue with me about now, as I have defined myself to be right, isn’t that clever?)

Here’s the bottom line, folks: The Problems Are Always Fundamental. If you write a flash fiction piece that I like, why do I like it? If you write a flash fiction piece that I don’t, why don’t I like it? It’s because there’s fundamental stuff going on that I like or don’t like. Nobody likes flat prose, flat imagery, or nothing happening. I might like your prose, your imagery, and the arc you trace, but now that just means I have to say, “why isn’t your prose more sing-songy?” or “why isn’t your imagery more emotionally evocative?” or “why does everything always have to end up so God damned cheery all the time?”

Instead of poking at your ability to write a coherent short story that meets the minimum threshold to keep me interested enough to read 500 words, I can start poking at the reasons you made the decisions you did, and asking why.

It’s entirely possible that this is a categorical distinction that is known to normal people already, or that it is not a real one and I have made this up exclusively to confuse myself, but there it is.

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(I know I missed a few days, I was working on a larger (much larger) piece that I will either post here or use for my creative writing class and post here much later)