 For Authors: July 04, 2018 Issue [#8990] |
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This week: Min-Maxing Edited by: Jeff  
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MIN-MAXING
Have you ever taken one of those personality profile tests, or the assessments that are supposed to find areas of strength and weakness in your life? One of the more popular tests in recent years has been StrengthsFinder, where you're evaluated based on 34 different traits that are then ranked based on the way you respond to a bunch of test questions. I took it for a job interview not too long ago and found out that my top strengths are:
 Input
Responsibility
Adaptability
Intellection
Arranger
What those five traits teach me is that I'm really good at working with existing information, and I'm a cerebral, logical type of personality. I'm good at absorbing input, thinking it through, and then arranging and adapting it into an ideal form. I'm not as strong in other areas like pure creativity, out-of-the-box thinking, empathy, leadership, etc.
While obsessive focus on the results of these kinds of assessments be detrimental, it's important to assess your strengths and weaknesses as a writer and a human being so that you can accurately identify those things you do well, and those things for which you might want to get some outside help.
In roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons, there's term called min-maxing. It's basically where you create a character that's specifically designed to take advantage of game mechanics in the maximal way, at the expense of other character traits that are viewed as unnecessary to that character's core skill set. For example, if you're creating a warrior, you'd select attributes and skills and abilities that give you the highest bonuses to your fighting skills, and would dump your bad attribute rolls, weaknesses, flaws, etc. into less needed categories like charisma or intelligence. Similarly, if you're playing a thief character, you'd maximize your dexterity, agility, and clandestine skills at the expense of being wiser, stronger, or having more endurance.
Min-maxing is often portrayed in a negative way, typically as a way of describing players who are more interested in taking advantage of loopholes than playing a well-rounded character. We've all seen the bad-ass warrior or the sneaky thief character before, but why not introduce some nuance to the character? What if you played a thief with terrible dexterity, who couldn't sneak around successfully to save his life? Or a wizard with an unusually low intelligence score, so he has to come up with inventive ways to use his magic rather than maxing out the number of spells in his repertoire.
Looking at the idea of assessing your strengths and weaknesses as well as the concept of min-maxing in terms of writing, I think it's important to get a sense of what you do well and what you do poorly. If you're a great plotter but terrible with creating interesting characters, that's valuable information. And if you're always able to come up with a compelling character but your narrative tends to lag in places, or your dialogue sucks, that's important to be aware of. That understanding is what will allow you to not spend too much time focusing on the stuff you already have a handle on, and will show you where you need to maybe spend a little extra time in order to make sure you're covering your bases. But in the course of making those adjustments, you need to be careful not to min-max too much. If you spend all of your effort leaning into your strengths and ignoring your weaknesses, that creates the potential for big problems in you work. More importantly, it prevents you from ever improving on your weaknesses and becoming a stronger writer.
The goal shouldn't be to minimize your weaknesses; it should be to focus on them enough to bring them up to a passable level and then relying on your strengths to really stand out.
Think of it like your report card in school. If you're great at History and terrible in Science, you don't just focus on getting an extra super good grade in History; you work harder in Science to get that grade up to a passable level and then use your strength in History to bolster your GPA and offset that Science grade that won't be as good so the two grades will balance out. In writing, it's worth doing the same thing. I know I'm good with dialogue, and with pacing. I know I'm lacking in "big picture" originality and coming up with fresh and interesting story beats. That means I need to spend a little more time coming up with my ideas and outlining my story (and possibly bouncing ideas or rough drafts off other people for their input), but that once I get over the hump and have a piece of writing to work with, I can optimize it and use the dialogue and pacing to really make it stand out. I wouldn't be able to come to that conclusion without an accurate assessment of who I am as a writer and as a person.
And so, I'll leave you with this question... what are your strengths and weaknesses as a writer? And, more importantly, how can that inform your process so that you're writing even better work than you already are?
Until next time,
Jeff
If you're interested in checking out my work:
"Blogocentric Formulations"
"New & Noteworthy Things"
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This month's official Writing.com writing contest is:
I also encourage you to check out the following items:
EXCERPT: Swear words were never part of my vocabulary and as a child I could never understand why adults used to say so many swear words.
I have always enjoyed music and I would often say that I loved all kinds of music. My son corrected me one time and said, “Mom, you never listened to Rap or Hip-Hop”. And, he was correct, I always thought it was a lot of noise. So, he found me some Rap and Hip-Hop music for me. I found that this 66 year old grandmother really does like Rap and Hip-Hop music.(2018)
EXCERPT: Having finally happy about how my story "I will" was written, I looked for a market and found ... none. Since the demise of Romance e-magazine a few months ago, it seems as if there are no markets for just romance stories unless at the novel or novella level.
EXCERPT: Friends are family and family means friends. Family means love. Family means home. A family is everything that we had in this world. They define us, they define who we truly are. They're the only ones who know the real you. No matter what happened, a family will serve as a wall that will protect you from any harm. They'll protect you from those people who are trying so hard just to see you get hurt.
EXCERPT: When they see my face
Like high school locker rooms
And water fountains.
And checkout lines in super markets
Sitting as a "B" in the back when the class is alphabetically sitting
Trying to learn the lesson but the lesson learned is about living
EXCERPT: An invigorating breeze swept across the solemn New England harbor town on the peaceful Sunday morning. With the rushing wind came a golden sunrise that gently kissed the horizon, basking the quaint city streets with a warm and ambient glow.
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Feedback from "For Authors Newsletter (June 6, 2018)" about investing in your writing:
Osirantinous  writes: "Great article, Jeff! When I decided mid-last year to actually get serious with my novel, I knew I needed to actually spend some money. I wasn't really bothered by how much. In being serious about publishing I knew there were costs. I didn't go to an editor, but a writing coach because I was at something of a loss with the novel. I'd been writing it for YEARS but never really with a goal in mind and I needed to hear from someone else whether I actually had a novel or just a shambles. For US$300 the coach read the novel (about 140K words) and gave me about 10 pages of feedback, and then a week of email to/fro. In New Zealand dollars that came to $430. That isn't cheap but I still think it's very well spent $$. I've completed huge revisions and tidied all plot holes etc. The coach recently saw the novel again (another US$300) for a 'final' view and I still appreciated her comments, and she focused on what questions I had for her regarding plots, characters etc. I will go to her with the second book, which she has seen once already, when it's in final mode too. So I've spent a total of US$900 which when I look at the number is 'OMG what????' but I am publishing the novel later this month, and I wouldn't be at this point if it wasn't for the coach. She gave me confidence in the story and characters and back in myself as a writer."
Thank you so much for sharing! And I totally agree; it's easy to look at the amount you're spending in aggregate and think, "OMG, that's so much money!" But the truth is that each expenditure should improve your work in some way and, at some point, the costs will earn out. Most indie authors I know end up spending more than they make with their first book or two, but those who take a long-term career seriously then see subsequent titles more than making up for the initial expense, once they find a following of readers. And in a lot of cases, those readers might not come if the book had a worse cover, or creative problems that weren't pointed out by a coach or editor! Attorneys in the U.S. invest in continuing education in the form of MCLE credits. Teachers and doctors attend seminars and conferences. Spending money to invest in your continued growth and success is a commonly accepted expense in a great many industries; writing should be no different, as long as you're investing your money wisely. 
Azrael Tseng  writes: "Great advice on being prudent with your money! Being on the wrong side of the poverty line myself, this is especially pertinent and will be taken to heart."
Thank you for your feedback! And best of luck navigating your way to the other side of the line! You're one heck of a good writer, so you definitely have the potential! 
DB Cooper writes: "Before POD {publish on demand technology} people lost thousands and thousands on vantage publishers, could not get anywhere because they lacked an ISBN#, and got deluged with unsold books."
I remember those days, and have more than a few friends who still have a bunch of unsold stock taking up space in their garage because a vanity publisher convinced them to order 5,000 print copies of their own books. I'm so happy that there's an economical and cost-effective alternative now in print-on-demand!
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