I recently watched George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead, which is an awful, awful movie, in case you haven’t seen it yet. I kind of figured it wasn’t going to be any good because Diary of the Dead was so lousy, but I make sure to give all of Romero’s “of the dead” movies a chance. This movie was awful not just because the plot was boring and uninspired (much like Diary of the Dead), but also, it just used a lot of cheap gimmicks and amateurish writing stunts—the sort of thing I would expect to see being submitted to an introductory creative writing workshop.

How is it that the person who co-wrote Night of the Living Dead, and single-handedly wrote Dawn of the Dead, could go on to write crap like this? In my opinion, since Dawn, Romero’s “of the dead” movies have gotten progressively worse: Day had some good things about it, but overall, it’s kind of boring; ditto Land, which was a little worse than Day, and then Diary and Survival are just so bad they’re really not worth watching unless you’re a hardcore fan.

It calls into question my entire view of how people become good writers: that if you practice, you’ll get good, and eventually you’ll theoretically get good enough that readers (or in this case, viewers) will be able to consistently count on you to always put out good stuff. Romero’s first feature length film, his very first, was the one that has gone down in history as the movie that defines zombie movies (prior to Night, let’s not forget, the word “zombie” meant a body—living or dead—whose mind is being controlled by a master). We could have perhaps assumed that John Russo (co-writer of Night) was the one that made Night so brilliant, except for the fact that Romero went on to write Dawn, which is, in my opinion, even better than Night (and is waaaaaay better than Russo’s version of follow-up to Night, the Return of the Living Dead movies, although some of them are fun and definitely worth a watch).

So the practice makes perfect idea did seem to apply to Romero’s career early on, but how do I make sense of the gradual decline of the series since Dawn? If it were true that you get better and better as you write more and that eventually you should reach a point where you can be counted on to always write good stuff, then Survival should be the best of them all. It just doesn’t add up.

And Romero here isn’t the exception that proves the rule. Many writers, if you look at their progression from early career forward, do not consistently put out good stuff, or perhaps it’s that they’re not able to always recognize whether something they’ve written is good enough to publish. Either way, there are many more besides Romero who do this (and I would also point out that there is a difference between the subjective nature of work—where I might think something is lousy but another, equally discerning reader might disagree—and the fairly universal state of “badness.” I’ve never met anyone who thought Diary of the Dead was good, and in fact, even though many of my friends are avid horror movie fanatics, I don’t know anyone besides myself and my husband who even gave Survival a chance; many people have simply given up on Romero’s zombie movies by now).

So it seems that my theory of practice getting you where you want to be is flawed, or at least, I think it’s partially true but is too limited. Something more is needed to explain how some people (usually the writers who only put out one book every several years) do seem consistently brilliant (and I wonder if those writers are writing other things inbetween, things that are not brilliant, things that we readers never see), while others can put out something amazing one year and something absolutely terrible the next.

The truth, I think, is far more complicated than that if you just keep at it, you’ll eventually get really good. I think even the best writers are still capable of writing crap, and maybe even very bad writers are capable of hitting on something amazing, by chance. Which means that writing will never get easy. There’ll be times where you have a great idea and it comes together perfectly, and times where, after several drafts, you just have to junk a piece because it will never work. But hopefully, knowing that will help staunch the pain of those failed pieces, and it might help us make sense of why sometimes the words seem to come so easily, and other times, inexplicably, we feel like we don’t really know what we’re doing all over again.