Comment by hinkley
2 days ago
My friend in college was worried she would fall into trap that she eventually fell into: She wanted to be a writer, and she felt that Comparative Lit put you in danger of knowing your writing was crap before you had the motivation and discipline to do something about it.
I tend to give junior devs as much rope as I can because they're just going to be awful until they get about 1000 hours in, and no amount of me scaring them is going to make that any better. And once in a while they surprise me by doing something they shouldn't have been able to do. We all have our preconceptions and nobody's are right all the time.
One way out of this trap is to set yourself ridiculous constrained writing challenges. "Write a story about a duck, but each paragraph has to invoke or subvert the corresponding item of this list of 30 random TVTropes articles; also the prime-numbered sentences have to each introduce a new character, and the even square-numbered sentences have to each kill one off." You can't compare that to a Franz Kafka Prizewinner.
And then once you've built up a small nest egg, you can set yourself ridiculous editing challenges: "salvage the story I wrote this time last month, in two 20-minute editing sessions".