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How good are you? Is there a way to tell?

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InspectorFarquar

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I suppose once a writer stops worrying about writing good enough and instead worries about getting the story right, getting the absolute all of it, catching character X just right and making the story honest enough, pleasing enough, to reader and characters alike, then I reckon that writer is good enough.

I doubt I'll ever sate on outside validation.
 
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Bubastes

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Someone at Princeton actually did a study, albeit in a very limited way, on this very question. NPR reported on it a while back, but here's a link to the original report. The answer, at least within the confines of the virtual reality tested, suggests that once a minimum level of quality is achieved, popularity of a piece of art within a population may be due to random factors. In other words, if we rewound the tape of history and played it again, some of the recognized masterpieces might be languishing in obscurity and some writers, musicians and artists that few of us have heard of might be the ones everyone agrees are the greatest.

Luck always plays a part because we don't and can't control everything around us.

Author and speaker Scott Berkun did a great speech touching on this issue. At 26:31, he describes how The Great Gatsby became a classic, enduring piece of literature. Spoiler: luck was involved.
 

InspectorFarquar

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But the OP wasn't asking about popularity of writing. He asked about writing good enough. Which Fitzgerald did, whether anyone ever read him or not. Luck had nothing to do with it.

Melville sold less than 3500 copies of Moby Dick in his lifetime — an average of less than 100 books per year, until it went out of print. Where it remained for roughly 40 years before becoming "rediscovered."

Maybe no book, or author, exemplifies the roller coaster ride of "popularity" better than Moby Dick and Melville. His frustration with popular tastes, and expectations of readership ("Why won't he just write another travelogue!"), contributed (mostly?) to him not publishing a single work of fiction the last 34 years of his life. Tragic.
 

CrastersBabies

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I agree with many. "Good" is subjective.

Sellable
Accessible
Clear
Entertaining

So many other things you can use in place of "good" and those are equally subjective.

For me, I started feeling more confident about my writing ability when I began selling stories to magazines/lit journals that I considered a decent gauge of "quality."

That's more measurable for me and I can create an assess goals for myself. Others might have different methods for assessing this. For example, when/if I get the ole novel published, I might look at sales and reviews, but that's a ways off.
 
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BethS

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For me, the easiest way to find out if something I've written is good or not, is to have someone whose opinion I respect read it.

I would add a caveat to that, based on personal experience. Yes, do pick someone whose opinion you respect but be prepared to discover that they may be completely the wrong reader for whatever you're writing. Not every book is for every reader, and sometimes people will just not connect to it. And that can make it hard for them to give you a helpful critique.

Ideally, you want someone who can appreciate the story and the characters, yet can still see the flaws.
 
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Roxxsmom

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Luck always plays a part because we don't and can't control everything around us.

Author and speaker Scott Berkun did a great speech touching on this issue. At 26:31, he describes how The Great Gatsby became a classic, enduring piece of literature. Spoiler: luck was involved.

This fact seems seems so obvious that it's hardly worth stating, yet it's amazing how vehemently some people deny it. I think it makes it easier to feel that one has control over the process. If you failed, you will succeed next time if you can only figure out how to be better (though that in of itself can be a moving and elusive target) or to work harder.

And of course, believing that failure is 100% about laziness or lack of smarts or skill (or to put it another way, good things always happen to good people and bad things always happen to bad people) makes it easier to feel unashamed contempt for people who have achieved less than you in life and to post snide little memes about them on FB.

Contempt feels GOOD when it is completely unleavened by humility!

It is also a bit disheartening to consider a world where no one has heard of many great masterworks. But it's also disheartening to realize that there may be other, equally amazing masters (and mistresses) whose work never reached us.

But the OP wasn't asking about popularity of writing. He asked about writing good enough. Which Fitzgerald did, whether anyone ever read him or not. Luck had nothing to do with it.

This is the thing. The study did emphasize that there's a definite baseline level of skill and competence the music had to possess before it had a chance of becoming popular in the game environment. But once that baseline level was achieved, it was a crapshoot.

Getting to a necessary level of competence in your craft is not luck (well except insofar as the talent component is luck of genetics, education, early experiences, and developmental quirks, of course). But once you've achieved that level, luck is very important in determining whether your work finds an audience and/or is discovered and regarded as groundbreaking or important later.

That's where the concept of making your luck comes from. You have to work hard and be good to get to that place where the right people will even have a chance of seeing and judging your work and finding it good.

There are probably other factors that determine whether or not your work gets the attention it deserves too, though. Gender, wealth, where you live, culture, race, and so on.
 
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jae_s1978

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I'm revising and republishing a novel I wrote seven years ago. I'm wincing when I see some of the bad habits (telling, too much internalization that stops the forward momentum of the plot...) I had back then. But I take it as a good sign that I'm able to spot my mistakes and bad habits from back then because it means that I improved my writing skills in the meantime.
 

Shunter

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I say my writing is good when a reader tells me they couldn't put it down.

I say my writing is good when a reader tells me they had a strong emotional response to it.

I say my writing is good when a reader tells me it made them think, and keep thinking.

I guess my baseline for 'good' is Reader's Digest magazine. I read it every month when my parents get it. It's... passable. I can read most articles without skipping lines. But it does not make me think, feel, or question. If I missed a month I probably wouldn't notice. The jokes occasionally make me smile, almost never laugh, the sad stories generally get a raised eyebrow rather than tears. And that's published, people pay for it, it's an institution. If I can evoke a better response than Reader's Digest, I consider a piece I've written to be good.
 

Rebekkamaria

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The only way I can tell if my writing is any good all by myself is when I read something I've written a long time ago. If I stop reading as a writer of the story and start reading as a regular reader who's enjoying the story, I know it has to be somewhat good.
 

msza45

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....I take it as a good sign that I'm able to spot my mistakes and bad habits from back then because it means that I improved my writing skills in the meantime.

I think this is a good point. You know you're writing is getting better when you can spot your mistakes.

Also, gettingby -- having read one of your short stories, I can provide you this feedback: I think your writing is very strong. I don't think your writing mechanics will in any way impede your ability to sell.

If I had to guess, your difficulty getting published may have more to do with the stories you are choosing to tell than the quality of the execution. I quite enjoyed the story I read, but I can understand why it might have difficulty finding a place in the market -- it was pretty experimental and complex. Those aren't bad things by any means, but it is kind of a high risk, high reward style. You're writing your Sgt. Peppers before you've written your Please Please Mes, if you can follow that. You're not playing 'the game,' so it's just going to take longer for a publisher to take a chance on you.
 

paddismac

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I honestly try not to think about it. And I certainly don't want to talk about it (Dunning Kruger Effect and all :gone: )

I can control proper spelling and correct grammar usage, but everything else is a subjective stylistic choice, (unless one is following a template of some sort). Whether or not it's good is totally dependent on the individual reader's preference. I can only judge whether the sentence, (paragraph, story) that I've written says exactly what I wanted it to say in the way I wanted it said. If it passes that test, then, to me, it's a success... but no guarantee that it's good. :Shrug:
 

Wrenware

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If your writing creates an emotional or intellectual response in the reader that's pretty close to the range of emotional/intellectual responses you were consciously trying to create in penning it, I'd say you've got the basic competencies down.

Beyond that, being good... I got nothing. But I would wager, the more aware you are of your old mistakes, the better you must be getting.
 
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Jamesaritchie

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...so there might be a parallel universe somewhere where Van Gogh was able to sell a painting within his lifetime?

He's an interesting case study for this question. He's my favourite artist and I love his work, but I can also see why he was so horribly unfashionable at the time. Amazing talent and originality doesn't always get recognised, especially when people are looking for something else or their subjective ideas about what's beautiful and what they want to hang on their walls stops them from recognising something that's outside their ideals. Rich people who want to buy vivid landscapes full of light dancing on water are probably not going to want to buy a picture of poor people eating potatoes in a dark room, no matter how amazingly well it's painted. (although even Van Gogh's style was different - I'd say there's an argument that he's not an impressionist but something different... his style wasn't what was in fashion and to the close minded, that's seen as "he got impressionism wrong" and not "he's doing something fresh and innovative")

I don't think it's wise to compare painting with writing. They not only aren't the same thing, they're judged very differently. It may be beside the point, but Van Gogh is no better than a hundred painters you can find in NYC any weekend of the year. He's just not that good, and would still be unknown, had he not become famous for his mental deficiencies. I've been in both, and the world of art has no relationship whatsoever with the world of writing.
 

Jamesaritchie

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I say my writing is good when a reader tells me they couldn't put it down.

I say my writing is good when a reader tells me they had a strong emotional response to it.

I say my writing is good when a reader tells me it made them think, and keep thinking.

I guess my baseline for 'good' is Reader's Digest magazine. I read it every month when my parents get it. It's... passable. I can read most articles without skipping lines. But it does not make me think, feel, or question. If I missed a month I probably wouldn't notice. The jokes occasionally make me smile, almost never laugh, the sad stories generally get a raised eyebrow rather than tears. And that's published, people pay for it, it's an institution. If I can evoke a better response than Reader's Digest, I consider a piece I've written to be good.

A matter of taste, I guess. I think you need to read a heck of a lot wider than RD, but those articles in RD are mostly reprints, and come from some of the largest, best written magazines in the world. It's always tough to compare nonfiction with fiction, but I find most things in RD to be remarkably well-written. I can't find better nonfiction writing of that type anywhere.
 

Jamesaritchie

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Luck always plays a part because we don't and can't control everything around us.

Author and speaker Scott Berkun did a great speech touching on this issue. At 26:31, he describes how The Great Gatsby became a classic, enduring piece of literature. Spoiler: luck was involved.

The Great Gatsby became good because it was written well. It became a classic because all the right people liked it.

I won't say luck never plays a part in writing success, but I will say that 99.99% of luck in publishing happens after you're published, not before. And even when luck happens, it is rarely, of ever, needed. The same success happens to hundreds of books that don't get "lucky" breaks.
 

Jamesaritchie

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But I can reread the same piece of writing I though was great and a week later wonder what the hell I was thinking.

Most writers I know feel the same way. So stop reading your writing a week later.

What do you mean by being able to tell how good you are? Good in what sense? Good at writing stand out sentences? Good at drawing lifelike characters? Good at dialogue, or mood and tone, or pace and flow? Good at telling whether you know what a story really is? Good at writing the kind of stories editors want?

I don't even try to judge such things because I'm wrong as often as I'm right. That said, some writers I I respect greatly say they do know when they write their first great, special, publishable story. Maybe I don't try because my first story was like that. I don't know. But I just don't see the point in trying to tell how good I am. Really, unless you're looking for a reason to quit, what difference does it make what you think of your own writing?

Writers, and beta readers, worry incessantly about how a story is told, which matters very little. It's what the story has to say that makes it publishable. The writing needs to be reasonably good, but nowhere near stellar, as long as the story has something to say, as long as it tells a truth people want to hear.

When Ray Bradbury finally wrote "The Lake", he said, I finallyfound it one afternoon when I was twenty-two years
old. I wrote the title "The Lake" on thefirst page of a story thatfinisheditself two hours later. Two hours after that I was sitting at my typewriter outon a porch in the sun, with tears running offthe tip ofmy nose, and the hair on my neck standing up.Why the arousalof hair and the dripping nose? I realizedI had at last written a really fine story. The first, in ten yearsof writing.

The Lake was no better written than the story he wrote the week before, or six months before, or two years before.
It was great because he knew he'd finally told the right story, and that said the right thing.

You have to learn to do the same, and I seriously don't think anyone can help you do this. Certainly not beta readers. You have to read everything, write much, and learn which story to tell. The right stories are always in you, which is why no one else can help. The Lake was inside Ray Bradbury, a part of him, and while the events were fictional, what the story had to say, the truth of it, came directly from his own life experience.


Stop worrying about your success rate, about how often those around you sell, and about the "quality" of your writing. You can certainly write well enough to sell, but you still need to know what a story really is, what editors really want, and how to get yourself into a story, how to tell the flat out truth in a way people want to hear.
 

chompers

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When the reader feels like they're right there alongside your characters, seeing the same things, feeling the same emotions, experiencing the same world.
 

gettingby

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I think this is a good point. You know you're writing is getting better when you can spot your mistakes.

Also, gettingby -- having read one of your short stories, I can provide you this feedback: I think your writing is very strong. I don't think your writing mechanics will in any way impede your ability to sell.

If I had to guess, your difficulty getting published may have more to do with the stories you are choosing to tell than the quality of the execution. I quite enjoyed the story I read, but I can understand why it might have difficulty finding a place in the market -- it was pretty experimental and complex. Those aren't bad things by any means, but it is kind of a high risk, high reward style. You're writing your Sgt. Peppers before you've written your Please Please Mes, if you can follow that. You're not playing 'the game,' so it's just going to take longer for a publisher to take a chance on you.

Thanks. What you're saying makes sense. I never plan for my stories to be as crazy as they come out and I never think that I am being too experimental, but I can see that my stories are often like that. After next week, I would love to do another swap with you. I think you are a great writer. From what I've read of your novel, it is pretty awesome!
 

Roxxsmom

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When the reader feels like they're right there alongside your characters, seeing the same things, feeling the same emotions, experiencing the same world.

How many readers have to tell you this before you believe it, and more importantly, before you're inoculated against the ones who don't like your work? :cry:
 
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