How Do I Know if My Writing is Any Good?
photo by Afif Kusuma via Unsplash
I’ve had a few clients lately who have asked me this question. Some are relatively new writers, who are realizing that this writing thing isn’t quite as easy as it looks. Some are more experienced, who have been working for a while and not seeing the kind of success they envisioned at the beginning.
Every writer asks this question – or at least, they should. It’s good to have confidence, but if you bound along, writing furiously, assuming it’s good just because you wrote it, you’re in trouble.
However, there is a fine line between healthy skepticism about your own work, and the soul-crushing feeling of “I’ll never be good enough.”
At the beginning, especially, there will be a vast gulf between what you want to do, and what you are actually able to achieve in terms of a finished product. These writers have not yet understood the maxim that “writing is rewriting” and that to get to the good stuff, you have to keep digging. There is a lot of craft to learn. Some people are better than others at reading as a writer: being able to analyze the works of writers they love to see how they do what they do. Some have read widely and deeply enough to learn quite a bit by osmosis. But in writing, like any art form, the learning is never “done.” It’s a constant, ongoing process. You can call a particular piece of work done, but for the next project you’ll be building on what you’ve learned, and learning new things as you go.
How your writing is perceived is also subjective. There is a certain grounding of good craft to master, but once you get past that basic stage, a lot will be up to individual interpretation. This is where experience plays a part. When you get different responses to your work from your writer’s group, your mentors, or agents, you may feel bewildered. You may think you need to fix something in order to make it “good.” And yes, maybe there is work to be done. But developing that sense of “I can listen to this feedback and do what I can to improve this piece, or ignore it because it’s not what I want for my story" can take a while to master. One book I was trying to write for years, died in part because I listened to too many voices other than my own. I needed to figure out the story I wanted to tell, and how to tell it.
It takes time to understand this. You can have talent, and that’s a good start. But you really need the following to have any chance of being good, in the sense that other people want to read your work:
Know your goal. The ultimate test of “good” writing is: does it do what you set out to do? Does it entertain? Persuade? Inspire? Teach? Knowing your goal for any piece of writing is as key as knowing how to create the effect you want.
Continual practice. This may be a “no duh” moment, but in order to improve you have to write. This does not mean continually studying books about writing. This does not mean just reading and hoping you will magically imbibe all the skills present in the prose. This does not mean working on random prompts or exercises with no purpose.
Continual reading as a writer, in other words, to understand how an author creates the specific effect they are looking for through words. This is best done with works with which you are already familiar, and focused on a particular aspect of craft: dialogue, setting, character development, etc.
Deliberate practice. If you want to learn specific craft skills, focus your exercises or prompts on those skills. If you want to learn to write a novel, write a novel. Write two or three, learning as you go.
Learn the skill of revision. This does not mean starting at page one and going through line by line to make sure your spelling and grammar are correct. That is line editing, and it is the last pass you should be doing before sending out your work. You need to learn the hierarchy of revision, starting with big-picture elements, and tackle that stuff first (overall plot and structure, character development, does the whole thing make sense...). Then work on things like dialogue and setting details, beefing up or removing secondary characters, etc. Then line editing.
Learn where, and how, to solicit helpful feedback. This may not be your writer’s group. They may not know much more than you do, or they may simply not have the skill to convey much more than “I like this, and I don’t like that.” You may need a knowledgeable editor, coach, teacher, or mentor to help you figure out what can truly be improved to bring your story from good to great. Know that at some point every writer needs at least one trusted person to read their work and give them good feedback. At some point, you will not be the best person to be able to see your work clearly.
If you do these things, your writing will get better. At some point, you might even realize it’s good.
