Writer Arrogance

Has anyone else ever had one of those times where you're watching a Tv show or movie, then start to put thought into the story and think to yourself "I could have done better"? I've had many of those moments, and i've started to call this feeling "Writer Arrogance", because i think that i'm being a bit arrogant for thinking that i can do better than professionals.

However, the funny thing is, J.R.R. Tolkien probably suffered from this when he created Middle-Earth; he admired the mythology of other countries and thought that he could create on for England. Just saying

Any thoughts on any of this?

I look at some of the material out there and think, sure, I can do better than that, or perhaps more accurately if a seemingly silly or poorly written premise is successful then when my work is finished and published it will do alright.

With that said writing is hard. You really need to try and make your characters likeable, the story gripping and the premise credible, or throw credibility out the window and still able to make it work which would be much more difficult. In a realistic story would some element be too farfetched? The TV series SWAT was criticized for once in a lifetime incidents being once a week for example. If the characters are nice, get along, where is the potential for conflict? How do you apply it without it coming across as simply being used for drama?

In short yeah I do think that I can write a good story, at least as good as some of the material out there, but I have enough pride to work on my story so I can prove it and keep reviewing any weaknesses I may have and turn them into strengths so I can be a better writer.

I actually feel that arrogance is actually a very important and admirable trait for a writer to have. After all, if you don't think your work is brilliant, then why should you subject others to reading it?

I think you're confusing arrogance with confidence. Arrogance is a negative trait pretty much by definition.

edited 2nd Feb '14 7:13:01 PM by SnowyFoxes

You too? I totally understand this feeling. Whether "I could have done better" or not is the standard by which I measure works of fiction, especially if said work has a premise that I like. If I feel like I could have done much better, I will have a low opinion of the work. But if I feel like I could not have possibly done better, then I will hold it in the highest regard.

Also, I think Snowy Foxes is right. You might be confusing arrogance with confidence.

@OP: All the time...getting paid to do something professionally is not a guarantee of quality. Bad writing is one of the reasons I started writing. However, I also often watch good shows and think "wow, that was well done, I'm going to learn from this."

There's nothing wrong with believing you can do better than what's currently out there. That belief is one of the ways storytelling changes. As long as you are willing to recognize quality when you see it, such a belief is not arrogance.

In a lot of ways, the old-guard writers who started 15 years ago or even 10 years ago could never get jobs in it now because the field has gotten much more competitive for new people and much more demanding of quality.

So every time you see Bruckheimer or Whedon, well...you might in fact be better than they are.

Sometimes I'll read something by Ursula la Guin or Alan Moore, or watch something like The Wire or Grave of the Fireflies or even early Simpsons, and I'll think to myself oh God, I'll never be a tenth as good as that, I may as well give up now... and then I watch some TV or read a more standard-level book, and things don't seem so bad, because if these banal fuckers can make it, then surely I can too! For me, the usefulness of shitty TV (and books and films and...) is short-circuiting the 'good taste' effect.

Also,

Well. On the one hand, it may be useful to pay attention to what people who have managed to get paid with real money are doing. On the other hand, you shouldn't give them undue reverence just because they get paid to do what they're doing.

It's often useful to look at things from a different perspective, so it might be instructive to look at how the sciences handles established names. People examine the evidence, then put out a theory, which is tested with more evidence. Although the nature of human beings gets in the way of this, in principle the person of the scientist and their body of work are treated separately. Established names — professors and such — are given respect and some benefit of the doubt, but ultimately, if they are spouting nonsense then someone will find the flaws and create something better.

The arts should be the same. The best response, as an artist, to seeing something done badly is to make something magnificent to replace it.

Stretching the definition of writing, but for the sake of analogy, I will add this quote from a computer programming textbook:

The first two are not relevant, but the third is: Hubris allows programmers to push the boundries of what is possible. Likewise, hubris, or if you prefer, arrogance, allows writers to try out new things, or a better take on a story. The aforementioned J.R.R. Tolkien certainly influenced every fantasy writter that came after him, I don't doubt many non-fantasy writers besides that, but he would have never done so, without the arrogance to think that the meandering pet project, started in his childhood, was worth releasing to the public, then fiction as we know it would be completely different, and poorer for it.

Sharur, thank you, that's a really good point. In fact, I think hubris (transgressing against the gods) is a better word for this than arrogance (the 'gods' here being established professionals, of course).

Laziness, in the programmer sense, actually is somewhat relevant (I think). It's nearly always better to say a thing in the shortest, most concise way that you can. Especially in the genres writers on this site tend to gravitate towards (ye gods, the number of doorstopper EPIC FANTASY MAGNUM OPUS part one of nine hundred and seven that could be trimmed down to 70,000 words and be stronger for it...). Similarly, impatience: it's normally best to start as close to the end of the story as you can.

This is all just my opinion, of course.

edited 3rd Feb '14 5:22:45 PM by imadinosaur

That's a very interesting link. I've used that technique as well, for my first complete story. Whenever I'd lose motivation I'd just pick up a certain fantasy novel which shall remain nameless and slog for a chapter or two before working up enough gumption to press on.

I agree that arrogance vs. hubris is an important distinction to make. Its one thing to believe in your project despite what others say, and another to think that your first drafts are brilliant and don't need any touching up or editing because 'I'm a genius!'. However useful it is, I'd say that like anything it should be tempered with other attributes. I mean Tolkien (as he's been mentioned before) might certainly have had some hubris, but he was also a critic of his own work and was famous for putting it through numerous drafts and revisions in order to get things just right.

edited 3rd Feb '14 5:46:35 PM by LittleBillyHaggardy

It should probably be noted that this is a bit of a... twisted... definition of hubris, which is taking one aspect of Aristotelian theory a bit out of context.

edited 3rd Feb '14 6:12:02 PM by imadinosaur

I'm not sure that there is a significant difference between hubris and arrogance, at least in the context of this discussion; what you're calling arrogance seems like confidence to me. Arrogance is "offensive display of superiority or self-importance; overbearing pride", while confidence is "belief in oneself and one's powers or abilities".

This is semantics to some degree, but I feel that it can help to be working from a common set of definitions (whether the ones that I linked to above or others agreed on in the thread).

@imadinosaur: That's an interesting link. ^_^ (I think that I may have seen it at some stage previously, years ago.) I'm not sure that it's quite the same as what they call "painter's panic", but I do very much recall encountering points in my work at which I've looked at the unfinished work and thought that it didn't seem terribly good. But that's okay: the work is, after all, unfinished, and it's amazing what the subsequent passes — whether shading and detail in a visual work or revision in a written piece — can do.

One thing that I'm not sure is mentioned in that article (I'll confess that I'm tired, and so may have missed it ^^; ) is that — I feel — one's "good taste" is not itself the problem; indeed, that taste can very much be a part of how one improves, by revealing problems so that they can be corrected.

I've encountered a number of things where I've thought, "I would've written that better," and, like others here have mentioned, taken comfort in the thought "if that complete and utter fucking train-wreck got published, there's hope for my stuff." (Of course, the other big difference between that train-wreck and my stuff is that the author of the train-wreck actually finished the work and submitted it - in this regard, their finished pile of steaming crap trumps my incomplete superior product...)

There are also a fair few other writers that have me wishing I could write half that well.

Well. Yes. :P

There are some stories I read purely to see how I can write them better.

I think we've all had at least one of these at one point or another. They can even be useful. For instance, the ending to Mass Effect 3 proved very instructive to me regarding just how not to write an ending.

As much as it sucks to have RGB space magic be the ending to one of the most beloved sci-fi stories in recent memory, the stark contrast of seeing such monumentally bad writing placed immediately adjacent to such quality helped illuminate just what about each made them that way.

There are a number of intelligent, incisive analyses of why the ending failed so spectacularly floating around the internet. I know I've certainly learned from them, and now consider them a prime resource to help novice writers such as myself avoid some of the less intuitive but nonetheless crucial pitfalls that crop up when writing.

I remember reading the introduction to one anthology of SF short stories, and the author mentioned he got his start from reading a really awful story in one of the pulps, declaring, "I can do better than that!" And then he made time to write that first story, had a couple of rejections, improved it, and well, I was now reading an entire paperback of his published stories.

You know, it just dawned on me now, that srebak is probably more right about Tolkien than he/she realizes. Tolkien admitted that the last march of the Ents and Eowyn killing the Witch-King came from him thinking he could do better than Shakespeare's Macbeth.

I really only have the thought of, "Hey, I wonder if I can write something that sounds like it is an actual episode of the show!" Ex: Gravity Falls

I have been having those thoughts ever since I started watching the anime Nisekoi. It's just so darn lazily written I think I might have a shot at a better premise than the writer.

No, no. I like Gravity Falls. I want to mimic the brilliance.

Oh, no, I was actually referring to the OP. The genre the series is in is really lacking in originality, at least a better (or for that matter, more sensical) setting would have gone a long way.

Now that I've started reading fanfics, I get the "I could do better" feeling all the time. It's amazing just how many fanfics suffer from poor grammar, inconsistent tense, or other obvious flaws.

I get that feeling sometimes, but it's usually tempered by the knowledge that - unlike most people writing T.V. shows, films and even books - I'm not thinking about the story under huge time pressure, financial pressure and executive/editorial pressure after staring at it for days on end, having come up with it from scratch at three in the morning because the execs said no to the previous plan due to it being too costly or the editor said that it needed to be changed because it was inaccessible.

As far as I'm concerned writer or viewer hubris - it seems more like viewer hubris if you're getting the feeling from watching things, to me at least - isn't a bad thing if it's recognising that there may have been a better way - or a way you like better but that the author/creator may have found distasteful - to do something, as long as it goes hand in hand with acknowledging that the person responsible may have been under pressure and was not in the position of looking at it from the outside, but rather created the whole thing. Good grief I'm long winded tonight.

Either way, to me whether it's a good thing or not depends on how you express it (leaving off that the culture the original term hubris was from did not think it was a good thing). To use an example, when a show I once enjoyed revealed in season four that one character had been an ex-spy the whole time it gave me the feeling in question because it was like having James Bond in a supporting role the whole time and then never shining light on him or letting him fix the problems that he could have easily solved. That set off a train of thought which inspired one of the novels I intend to write and I still attribute it to this feeling - that: deciding you could have done it better and then actually trying to meet the self-set challenge, is a good thing.

On the other hand, if I had complained that the authors/creators were stupid and that I could have done it better without backing it up or put that as an author's note at the top of a fanfic while complaining that they did it "wrong", especially without considering that it's easier to change a work than create one from scratch and that starting flame wars or writing fanfic than to work for pay under huge pressure, then that would be a bad thing.

Clarification: I'm not saying fanfic is bad - I'm saying that writer/viewer arrogance/hubris can be bad when it doesn't take external pressures and the creators' tastes into consideration and blindly declares that the creator is "wrong" or "stupid" and that they could have done it "better", because you can't do personal taste better; even if that personal taste runs toward melodrama aimed at the lowest common denominator. Grammar, spelling, factual errors and inconsistencies, though, can be done better.

So what I really should have said instead of babbling, is that while I do get that feeling sometimes, I always stop and, when it's not facts and inconsistencies or grammar and spelling and other fixed things, tell myself "No, it's not a case of better or worse, I would have done that differently."

But, then, I'm weird.