When it comes to being a talented writer, one of the most important aspects of the craft is that you need to be critical of yourself. No matter who you are, you shouldn't think that you're above making mistakes and that you can't screw things up.
After all, the reality is that the more confident you get about your abilities as a writer, the easier it becomes to make mistakes. The more certain you become of your craftiness, the easier it becomes to make mistakes that sometimes cannot even be fixed.
So the reason that I'm writing about this is that lately I've ran into cases where writers simply did not do their jobs. They didn't question whether their ideas were good enough and whether they had the abilities to pull their story off.
For example, a couple of weeks ago I managed to - after spending like a month or so - finish a book that had recently won a prestigious literary award in my country. This book was supposed to be the real deal and a pleasure to read.
However, the problem with this novel (about a kid and a reverend at St. Helena island in the 1600s) was that it just wasn't any good. The book was actually so awful that it was perhaps the worst novel that I have ever read in my life.
In practice, the worst thing about this 500 page monstrosity was that there was no real story in it. Even though the book was billed as 'an adventure', there wasn't really anything in it (it lacked story structure) that would have made you think that way.
In reality, the structure in it was so lacking that it took like 200 pages before anything even happened in it. The first 200 pages mostly consisted of a seven year old kid giving tedious monologues that went on and on (the kid sounded at least 40 years old) and on.
Later on, when there actually happened something, the writer simply kept forgetting what he had written earlier in the book. This lead to him either repeating earlier chapters (again and again) or writing random stuff that was full of plot holes and continuity errors.
So not surprisingly, after I finished the book, I couldn't help but to wonder how there were so many problems in it (story, dialogue, continuity etc.). How was it possible for an acclaimed author to screw things up so badly like he did (he wrote it for 30 years)?
After all, had he or the publisher paid even a tiny amount of attention to its problems and had they taken a critical look at it, this disaster could have been avoided. Had they done their jobs, this embarrassment wouldn't perhaps have happened.
In that sense, when I think about this particular case and writing in general, it's clear that (I would say most) writers don't pay enough attention to what they're doing. They don't focus on the basics and the fundamentals of the craft as much as they should.
After all, even though they and the critics - who many times are sycophants - might think otherwise, there are so many problems with how most of these authors write. They just don't understand that not everything that they write makes sense or works.
In that sense, if you want to be a solid writer that writes good stuff, you absolutely do need to be aware of things like the story structure. You need to know the fundamentals so that you could have a solid idea of how stories are supposed to be written.
After all, if you know the basics well enough, then you can start focusing on writing your story. That is when you get to come up with the premise, the characters and the storylines that might interest you and that might fascinate your readers too.
In the end, if you'll work hard enough and keep your mind focused on the task, there's a pretty good chance that good things might happen to you. As long as you're willing to keep pushing and won't give up easily, things might turn out good for you.
On the other hand, if you're not willing to pay attention and be critical of yourself, things won't work. In these cases, you won't be able to come up with good stuff, no matter how much critics might think otherwise and no matter how much they might praise your work.
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