I, too, recognize and respect many people here. I would not dare to list them all, just as I would not dare to try and publicly list all my friends. That way lies nothing but inadvertent slights and endless apologies.
And I think knowing a bit about a writer's background is almost always of value to me.
But that doesn't mean I upvote posts on that basis. Upvoting is an editorial function. You don't do it for yourself. You do it for other people. And so the quality of each piece of writing must stand and fall on its own.
You have to learn to think like this to write effectively. You have to try to look dispassionately at the writing of people you like and admire. Because, alas, there is nothing more dear to you than your own prose. William Faulkner said: "In writing, you must kill all your darlings." You will write a lot of stuff that looks good to you, but that just doesn't fit. You will write stuff that starts out sensible and then turns on itself. You will write things that are just too delicate to say on the web. And you will make boneheaded mistakes. The art of writing is not so much to avoid doing these things, but to catch yourself in the act and edit them, as consistently as you can, and hopefully without hurting your own feelings too much.
I think that might have been Arthur Quiller-Couch advising to "murder all your darlings", according to the book Writing Tools I was reading last night.
I, too, recognize and respect many people here. I would not dare to list them all, just as I would not dare to try and publicly list all my friends. That way lies nothing but inadvertent slights and endless apologies.
And I think knowing a bit about a writer's background is almost always of value to me.
But that doesn't mean I upvote posts on that basis. Upvoting is an editorial function. You don't do it for yourself. You do it for other people. And so the quality of each piece of writing must stand and fall on its own.
You have to learn to think like this to write effectively. You have to try to look dispassionately at the writing of people you like and admire. Because, alas, there is nothing more dear to you than your own prose. William Faulkner said: "In writing, you must kill all your darlings." You will write a lot of stuff that looks good to you, but that just doesn't fit. You will write stuff that starts out sensible and then turns on itself. You will write things that are just too delicate to say on the web. And you will make boneheaded mistakes. The art of writing is not so much to avoid doing these things, but to catch yourself in the act and edit them, as consistently as you can, and hopefully without hurting your own feelings too much.