the giftie gie us

“How,” someone asked in a writing forum, “do you get better at writing?”

As you can probably imagine, there were a lot of replies with the same, oft-heard advice. Write every day… read a lot… My answer was different. I wrote, same as for any art: you need to have, or develop, an ability to come back and experience the thing YOU created as if it had been done by a stranger.

Visual artists go so far as to look at their drawings in mirrors, or upside down, so as to spot the mistakes hiding behind familiarity. As important a skill as this is in writing, I doubt many people talk about it, or even realize they’re exercising it. I do know that Robert Burns wrote:

“O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae many a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion”.

While that poem is about noticing (ergh) lice, it does contain great truth. To see your work as others see it— how else to really know what needs fixing?