"Dear Mrs. Fenton, Kevin is getting much better at singing quietly": My Five Strengths As A Writer and Other Exercises in Wishful Thinking

Kate passed a meme onto me: identify your five strengths as a writer.  I'm not sure I have five strengths as a writer.  But here goes:

1. I perservere. There are sentences in Merit Badges that go back 18 years.  No one wants to admit to being a plodder, but I am one.

2. I think I'm getting a little better. I look at what I wrote in the 90s and what I've written more recently and I  think there's some improvement: there's more at stake in the stories the characters are more sharply defined.

3. I am getting more emotionally brave.  I owe this to a couple of friends: Jon Spayde,  said of an early draft of Merit Badges, "you have walked a long way in these characters' heads, now it's time to walk in their hearts."  About that same time, Minnesota J said,  "this draft is basically a smart marketing guy presiding over a bunch of high school kids."

4. I try to make use of criticism.  When Margot Livesey said that when one editor tells you that you have too many characters and another tells you you have too few, the correct response is to acknowledge that you have a problem and it has to do with characters. I've tried to see what's valuable in all criticism, even when it seems contradictory, vague or half-assed. This is not my natural impulse. My former creative director at Kilter said, "You take criticism well, just not on the day it's given."

5. I try to read to become a better writer. 

My six-plus weaknesses:

I overwrite: too many strained constructions, saying too little, too many damn latinate 1. words.

2. I still don't have a good feel for traditional plot.

3. It takes me years to find the pulse of a piece of writing. 

4. I am still too soft on my characters.

5. I'm generally weak on the structural strategies of fiction–the kind of thing that Charlie Baxter is so brilliant at.   

6. Many of my sentences are ugly.

7. Despite my efforts, I'm kind of lazy. I need more detail in my paragraphs, more classics in my reading, more research feeding my non-fiction.   

8. I'm sure there are others. please let me know what they are.   

Comments

[Mandy]

There aren't others, Mr. Silly Pants.
You have an amazing vocab, and here's the thing: you use words so, so accurately. See, I'm sure there is a word for so, so accurately, and I'll bet you know it.

[kate]

You're full of shit, Kevin. You're sentences are never ugly and you're not lazy. And I agree with Mandy about your vocab and your accurate use of words. So take that.

[K]

I am full of shit, generally, but I wasn't fishing for compliments, more pre-empting insults. That said, I did write that post just as I was trying to revise a section of my memoir devoted to junior high. Maybe only ugly sentences do justice to j high.