Brilliance in Writing and the Actor-Observer Bias
Do you ever think to yourself: my writing is just so-so, it’s not like ….(famous writer you admire)…. they’re brilliant? Welcome to the critical path of being a novice. Novice writers often judge their own writing very differently from how they judge other people’s work. This happens because of a psychological pattern called the Actor–Observer Bias. Internally, you see every part of your own writing process — the messy draft, the awkward sentences, the second-guessing, the struggles to find the right word. Because you see all this, you tend to explain your “not-so-great” paragraphs as something born not made: “I’m not naturally good at this” “I must not be a real writer” Attributing initial writing problems to your own abilities as ‘the actor’ is not where it ends. When you are the ‘observer’, looking at someone else’s writing, you only…
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