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Who’s a better writer? Tim or Olive?

tim chan —  August 24, 2012 — 3 Comments

Olive and I are competitive.

Sometimes competition can be healthy, as a way of pushing the other to be better. Sometimes competition can get unhealthy, like the time I introduced Olive to the game of RISK during our anniversary trip… the game ended in tears.

Tim vs OliveWhen it comes to writing, I always say that Olive is the better writer. We have never introduced the idea of competition to our writing. Maybe I should try and see what the response it.

Here’s today’s way of gauging whether Olive or I am the better writer – at least over the past 6 months.

This is the list of our top 10 blog posts from the Spring and Summer of this year.

1. When a Friend Passes Away (A Tribute to Kevin Huang) – by Tim

2. Dear Hypothetically Gay Child – by Tim

3. Dear Extroverts (An Honest Letter from an Introvert) – by Olive

4. Why I Refused a Diamond Ring – by Olive

5. My Wife is Mad at Me and I Don’t Know Why – by Tim

6. How to Fight Fairly with Your Spouse (or anyone else) – by Olive

7. Three Words I Deleted from my Vocabulary - by Olive

8. How to Find a Mature Man – by Olive

9. A Warning to Single Men about Marriage and Parenting – by Tim

10. Confessions of a Former Ballerina: How Ballet Shaped and Scarred me – by Olive

The results. 6-4 for Olive. Olive wrote 6 out of our top 10 most-read blog posts from the last six month. I wrote 4. Darn.

Oh well. What can I say, it was pretty close. Next time though, next time the results will be different. Just you wait and see…

 

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  • Cam

    I guess I don’t see a good reason to agree with your tacitly assumed criteria for being the “better writer” as being the writer who was more widely read. That doesn’t seem like very good criteria to me for determining who the better writer is. It may go some ways towards telling you who the more interesting writer is, but surely not the better writer. If the most widely read authors were considered the best authors, we would find ourselves in the awkward position of having to admit that authors like Danielle Steele and Louis L’Amour are among the best authors of all time.

    If by “better author” you simply meant, “more widely read author,” then I suppose your criteria works. Yet it is still flawed, for it doesn’t take into account possible factors like:
    -perhaps more women read blogs than men and women readers identify better with women authors, therefore more readers were drawn to Olive’s blogs
    -perhaps Olive’s subject matter was more interesting overall
    -perhaps Olive’s blogs reacted better to keyword searches and directed more people to her blogs that way

    There are probably more considerations, but I think I have made my point. You cannot really compete until you have much more solid criteria in place. If there are no rules, there is no sport. But perhaps it is a better idea to keep the criteria more fluid and the competition more friendly.

    • http://www.timandolive.com tim chan

      “If there are no rules, there is no sport” – I like that!

      As we continue writing one of the tensions I feel is the decision over spending time creating better content or spending time getting our content more read. I suppose I agree with you that “more widely read” does not necessarily reflect “better” author – though many times it does.

      That being said, it is more of a friendly competition between Olive and I. She actually doesn’t like looking at the statistics, so maybe it’s more of me “competing” against her than vice-versa.

      Thanks for coming to visit our blog and commenting Cam!

  • Cam

    Well, just judging the book by its cover, I would say that Olive’s blogs definitely have more interesting titles than yours, Tim. Put some more provocative or grabbing titles on your blogs and see what happens.