I'm a university student in a writing and literature program; I've always had a bit of lingering impostor syndrome because I worry my writing is never going to go anywhere. I'm afraid of ending up like that Maugham character, Hayward, from Of Human Bondage, who is perpetually convincing everyone around him that his budding artistic talent will one day magnificently blossom--and then he's unceremoniously killed in his middle age, having never amounted to much.
In my first year of uni, I wrote one of the worst short stories... ever, I think. My professor gave me several very direct pages of feedback, though it could have been summed up by the sentiment of your agent's "I don't know how to say this, but it's not good." She thought the characters were awful, unlikeable people; their relationship was unconvincing; the inclusion of a character using "they/them" pronouns was too confusing; the plot was overstuffed; the comedy I inserted was painfully unfunny. I was embarrassed that I had even created it, mostly because it came from a place of such sincere passion and earnestness, and it had been a total failure.
But any idea that springs from that deep is pretty hard to uproot and compost over a little academic humiliation. And if the plot is too dense to fit in a short story, why not add 200 pages and give it some breathing room? A couple years later, I sketched out a whole novel outline, resurrecting these immensely hateable people (confusing pronouns and bleak relationship intact). I still couldn't bring myself to commit any words to the page, because of that question: Is this idea good enough? Will the words I write be good enough?
So I made a deal with myself; I would start writing it, and I would never show it to anybody. It wasn't *really* representative of the novel I imagined writing. It would be some playful hobby that nobody else would pass judgement on, with full permission to be terrible. This wasn't An Example of My Writing, this was just... writing.
Unsurprisingly, it's leaps and bounds better than anything I've written in the last couple years. Or maybe it isn't :) But right now, I'm the only one who gets to see it. It exists in the big, calm nothing.
PS. I'm taking a course on Chaucer and we just finished reading the Knight's Tale. I was struck by the descriptions of paintings in the temples of Venus, Mars, and Diana. It strongly reminded me of the paintings in the two castles in SGE... There's a fancy literary term for it and everything: "ekphrasis." Love your writing, books or blogs <3 Have a great week.
THIS IS IT. Perfect encapsulation. You just let yourself write into that silence, trusting the process. Sometimes 'Is it Good Enough' means just ripping loose and letting creativity take over, drawing you into the silence... Then later, in revision, the calculation can become a little more analytical. The words mean different things at different times. Thank you for your story!
a. pete is a rock star i'm too intimidated to say 'hi' to when i see him at conferences. what a world you knew him/"got him" when! :)
b. since childhood, my mantra was "if you don't have time to do it right the first time, when are you going to have time to go back and do it again?" alas, at THIS stage in life, i've had to occasionally exhale with "done, not perfect."
c. we are all thrilled for NEW BOOK. and all of your woo woo. :)
happy creating and void-listening, dear soman!! :D
He really is a rock star -- I'd be nowhere without him! And I do like that childhood mantra. Amazing how the simplest lessons as a child still apply... I'll keep being woo-woo, just for you :)
I think focusing of the phrase "good enough" can be damaging as much as it can be useful. Some people think of good enough as being practically perfect, while others think of it as "this doesn't suck". That's where it becomes really important to know how to measure good enough. I love the phrase "your best is good enough" for so many reasons, but that gets into that a persons "best" is defined as. Most people think of their best as being a bar that can only move us as you get better at whatever they're doing, but I like to think of my best as being flexible from day to day. On a day when I'm not feeling well or I'm struggling to focus on anything my best is probably just getting some random weird ideas written down for me to go through later. On a day when I'm feeling great and my mind is clear I could write out an entire character breakdown and scene by scene description of my next play (which maybe came from one of those weird ideas from an off day). I think a person's best is the absolute most they can do with the current situation, and that is what is good enough.
When talking about the quality of something I've created, sometimes I think it will never reach "good enough". But this might be a good way to figure it out. Imagine you are in a room with both people you know well and complete strangers. This room is filled with anonymous work and your book or chapter or piece of art is one of them. These works range from being the best in the world to the worst in the world. Would you be embarrassed to hear someone talking about your work, whether their words are positive or negative? Would you want to keep people away from your work or bring them closer to it? Would you be ok with someone telling the whole room which work is yours? Would you be ok with your work being in the room in the first place?
It's a test of both how you feel about the work and how you feel about getting other people's opinions of your work. Not everyone is going to love everything you create, not even Shakespeare can escape that truth. Only you can decide when you reach good enough. Only you know when you'd be proud to have your work discussed and pointed out in that room. But if you do your best, no matter what level your best is at, every day, eventually you'll be excitedly showing everyone in the room which anonymous work is yours.
What a beautiful exploration of how the words can be used for good or evil. How very true. It all comes down to that internal metronome and making sure it's attuned to help rather than hurt you.
This is incredible. Now I really want to try out this technique, both for my writing and for everything else in my life. I struggle to distance myself from my writing, especially when it comes to revising. So it can be hard to find that perfect spot between “this is horrible” and “this is the best thing ever written”. But you’ve shown that it’s possible, so it must be. Still, any tips for getting to this point would be greatly appreciated!
When I think of am I good enough I immediately think of if my best is good enough, good enough for people to like me. To accept me. But over the past couple of years I have learned that my best only has to be enough for myself.
It also is just a lot easier to please just yourself, over every person you meet. Because at the end of the day, the only person your left with is yourself
Your best is always good enough, it has to be, its all anyone has. Just remember that everyone has good days and bad days and even if your best becomes a little worse on those bad days, it is STILL good enough.
Wow! I'm glad you were able to start over with something you honestly know is better. I constantly ask myself if something is good enough especially in writing, which leads me to scrap stuff a million times. Sometimes I wonder if it's excessive, or if I should join certain ideas into one story since they kinda have a similar theme.
Has that happened, where you planned things to be in a separate story or spin off but you just decided to join it to one storyline because it was better like that and avoided repetition?
I wish I thought about things so deliberately -- to me it's just about whether the flow of the story feels like it has momentum, regardless of how many threads there are.
oh that's nice! I feel like I overthink a lot and take a while to get to the momentum, though it's already in my head! It's just stuff like "well I think the pacing is off" or "how can this make the best sense" and always "wait i think this plot can go in a different direction"
I'm a university student in a writing and literature program; I've always had a bit of lingering impostor syndrome because I worry my writing is never going to go anywhere. I'm afraid of ending up like that Maugham character, Hayward, from Of Human Bondage, who is perpetually convincing everyone around him that his budding artistic talent will one day magnificently blossom--and then he's unceremoniously killed in his middle age, having never amounted to much.
In my first year of uni, I wrote one of the worst short stories... ever, I think. My professor gave me several very direct pages of feedback, though it could have been summed up by the sentiment of your agent's "I don't know how to say this, but it's not good." She thought the characters were awful, unlikeable people; their relationship was unconvincing; the inclusion of a character using "they/them" pronouns was too confusing; the plot was overstuffed; the comedy I inserted was painfully unfunny. I was embarrassed that I had even created it, mostly because it came from a place of such sincere passion and earnestness, and it had been a total failure.
But any idea that springs from that deep is pretty hard to uproot and compost over a little academic humiliation. And if the plot is too dense to fit in a short story, why not add 200 pages and give it some breathing room? A couple years later, I sketched out a whole novel outline, resurrecting these immensely hateable people (confusing pronouns and bleak relationship intact). I still couldn't bring myself to commit any words to the page, because of that question: Is this idea good enough? Will the words I write be good enough?
So I made a deal with myself; I would start writing it, and I would never show it to anybody. It wasn't *really* representative of the novel I imagined writing. It would be some playful hobby that nobody else would pass judgement on, with full permission to be terrible. This wasn't An Example of My Writing, this was just... writing.
Unsurprisingly, it's leaps and bounds better than anything I've written in the last couple years. Or maybe it isn't :) But right now, I'm the only one who gets to see it. It exists in the big, calm nothing.
PS. I'm taking a course on Chaucer and we just finished reading the Knight's Tale. I was struck by the descriptions of paintings in the temples of Venus, Mars, and Diana. It strongly reminded me of the paintings in the two castles in SGE... There's a fancy literary term for it and everything: "ekphrasis." Love your writing, books or blogs <3 Have a great week.
THIS IS IT. Perfect encapsulation. You just let yourself write into that silence, trusting the process. Sometimes 'Is it Good Enough' means just ripping loose and letting creativity take over, drawing you into the silence... Then later, in revision, the calculation can become a little more analytical. The words mean different things at different times. Thank you for your story!
a. pete is a rock star i'm too intimidated to say 'hi' to when i see him at conferences. what a world you knew him/"got him" when! :)
b. since childhood, my mantra was "if you don't have time to do it right the first time, when are you going to have time to go back and do it again?" alas, at THIS stage in life, i've had to occasionally exhale with "done, not perfect."
c. we are all thrilled for NEW BOOK. and all of your woo woo. :)
happy creating and void-listening, dear soman!! :D
He really is a rock star -- I'd be nowhere without him! And I do like that childhood mantra. Amazing how the simplest lessons as a child still apply... I'll keep being woo-woo, just for you :)
I think focusing of the phrase "good enough" can be damaging as much as it can be useful. Some people think of good enough as being practically perfect, while others think of it as "this doesn't suck". That's where it becomes really important to know how to measure good enough. I love the phrase "your best is good enough" for so many reasons, but that gets into that a persons "best" is defined as. Most people think of their best as being a bar that can only move us as you get better at whatever they're doing, but I like to think of my best as being flexible from day to day. On a day when I'm not feeling well or I'm struggling to focus on anything my best is probably just getting some random weird ideas written down for me to go through later. On a day when I'm feeling great and my mind is clear I could write out an entire character breakdown and scene by scene description of my next play (which maybe came from one of those weird ideas from an off day). I think a person's best is the absolute most they can do with the current situation, and that is what is good enough.
When talking about the quality of something I've created, sometimes I think it will never reach "good enough". But this might be a good way to figure it out. Imagine you are in a room with both people you know well and complete strangers. This room is filled with anonymous work and your book or chapter or piece of art is one of them. These works range from being the best in the world to the worst in the world. Would you be embarrassed to hear someone talking about your work, whether their words are positive or negative? Would you want to keep people away from your work or bring them closer to it? Would you be ok with someone telling the whole room which work is yours? Would you be ok with your work being in the room in the first place?
It's a test of both how you feel about the work and how you feel about getting other people's opinions of your work. Not everyone is going to love everything you create, not even Shakespeare can escape that truth. Only you can decide when you reach good enough. Only you know when you'd be proud to have your work discussed and pointed out in that room. But if you do your best, no matter what level your best is at, every day, eventually you'll be excitedly showing everyone in the room which anonymous work is yours.
What a beautiful exploration of how the words can be used for good or evil. How very true. It all comes down to that internal metronome and making sure it's attuned to help rather than hurt you.
This is incredible. Now I really want to try out this technique, both for my writing and for everything else in my life. I struggle to distance myself from my writing, especially when it comes to revising. So it can be hard to find that perfect spot between “this is horrible” and “this is the best thing ever written”. But you’ve shown that it’s possible, so it must be. Still, any tips for getting to this point would be greatly appreciated!
When I think of am I good enough I immediately think of if my best is good enough, good enough for people to like me. To accept me. But over the past couple of years I have learned that my best only has to be enough for myself.
If you have the highest standards for yourself, then the rest takes care of itself :)
It also is just a lot easier to please just yourself, over every person you meet. Because at the end of the day, the only person your left with is yourself
Your best is always good enough, it has to be, its all anyone has. Just remember that everyone has good days and bad days and even if your best becomes a little worse on those bad days, it is STILL good enough.
Wow! I'm glad you were able to start over with something you honestly know is better. I constantly ask myself if something is good enough especially in writing, which leads me to scrap stuff a million times. Sometimes I wonder if it's excessive, or if I should join certain ideas into one story since they kinda have a similar theme.
Has that happened, where you planned things to be in a separate story or spin off but you just decided to join it to one storyline because it was better like that and avoided repetition?
I wish I thought about things so deliberately -- to me it's just about whether the flow of the story feels like it has momentum, regardless of how many threads there are.
oh that's nice! I feel like I overthink a lot and take a while to get to the momentum, though it's already in my head! It's just stuff like "well I think the pacing is off" or "how can this make the best sense" and always "wait i think this plot can go in a different direction"
I love this, because we always know, ya know? Almost always. It's not hard to hear the answer if you're listening and honest with yourself.
Your body won't let you move on if it's not good enough... unless you're forcing it past the problem.