Some time after I started seriously writing and studying the craft, I noticed I was having trouble really enjoying movies or getting caught up in the mystery and marvel of a book or a story. Throughout the entire experience, I realized that I had successfully plotted every event, character interaction, and motivation into a graph-like form in my head. It felt a bit like blasphemy, turning an artistic experience into a quasi-math. Yet, for better or worse, my head was full of quantifiable plot lines and character-arcs and dialogue patterns and motifs and symbols. Even watching plot based commercials was becoming exhausting.

This experience was (and still is) two-fold for me. The easy answer is that after studying writing and the art of creating stories, I had become consciously aware of what our sub-conscious does every time we see a story. Our brains break down every element in a story and create a nice and neat result so we can tell the difference between Hemingway and The Fast and The Furious. And, partially, yes, I had become aware of what my mind was doing and how stories are structured. But as writer (read: someone who likes to complicate everything), that was too simple an answer. 

It’s similar to how I would imagine a magician feels while he watches another magician perform magic. None of the spectacle is lost on him, it is only becomes secondary to his main concern: how does the other magician do it. Not in a sense of wonderment akin to how the crowd views the event, the magician’s senses are trained to look past the flash and see the source. He knows there are certain methods and equipment used to accomplish certain tricks and thinks of the technical preparation and the engineering that goes into it. He may even be looking for something to incorporate in his own act.

Barring any sort of blatant thievery, writers operate on the same sort of scale. Our sensibilities are tuned slightly different than non-writers, which is not to say that we’re better than everyone else, only tuned differently (out of tune sometimes). This is why writers make some of the best book reviewers and readers: because we see past the spectacle to the working parts of the story and the technical aspects. When collecting feedback on a story or poem in progress, it’s important to gather as much feedback as possible, but it may be helpful to find other writers who know the craft and can see past the flashing lights of a story. In short, find other writers to proofread pieces first. It may cost you a return favor, but in the end, it will be worth it. And don’t forget to submit that new, wonderfully edited piece too!