Recently, a writer friend of mine (let’s call this person T) sent me a link to a story at The Onion shredding the pretensions of a bad writer who has no idea he’s a bad writer, called “Novelist Has Whole Shitty World Plotted Out.”

Explaining the link, T had added a simple message: “God, this makes me self-conscious as hell.”

There is no reason to be self-conscious, because T is one of the best writers I know, published or not, and one of the few writers whose voice moves me to envy.  Reading Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, I was repeatedly reminded of T’s writing by King’s easy and evocative style.  T is a natural.

At the same time, another friend of mine asked me to read a story written by an acquaintance, whom we will call C.  C has been writing for years, is well-educated, and well-versed in all the Do’s & Don’ts of writery. Yet, lurking in the first paragraph were half a dozen cringe-worthy mistakes that any decent writer should know to avoid.  As I read on, it didn’t get better, so I reluctantly told my friend that I thought the story was quite awful.

We were each relieved to find the other in agreement.

Yet, while T is hesitant despite natural talent, C is determined and confident all out of proportion to reality. I had stumbled onto a perfect case study in the contrast between over-confident yet lousy writers and talented yet self-doubting writers, demonstrating the perverse influence the “Dunning-Kruger Effect” has on literature, a problem I have discussed before.

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