Judging Your Own Work

Stories can always be better.  Well, maybe that’s not an entirely fair statement.  Stories aren’t optimization problems, after all, and what is “better” to one person or what betters a story in one dimension will not necessarily have the same positive effects for other people or in other dimensions of storytelling.  The nature of writing, though, is that each story we tell occupies a kind of snapshot in our writing lives, such that, when we return to the story even just a few weeks or months later, we may well approach it with different eyes, a different mindset, that will lead us to want to make changes.  Whether these are improvements or simply changes varies, but it is also true that, in general, our writing abilities improve with time and practice, which means if I write a story today, I will probably be able to tell the same story better if I were to have written it in three months, instead.  For instance, I might have put more thought into the complicated tense structure of the preceding sentence.

At some point, therefore, it is necessary as an author to decide, not when a story is perfect, but when it is “good enough.”  Good enough to submit?  Good enough to publish?  Good enough for a world of potential readers to engage with over however long the story endures?  Good enough shouldn’t be understood as settling for something lesser, but as an acknowledgement that, at least for most authors, complete and permanent satisfaction with a story is probably unachievable.  The words on the page will never perfectly reflect the vision in our heads, evoke the emotions we imagine, convey the full depth, texture, and complexity of the story we create.  In a sense, every form of storytelling is a valiant attempt to translate into communication with our fellow humans an irreplicable neural pattern unique to the teller.

That is the point of writing, though, at least to me: to share the stories I imagine.  I don’t write for myself – I could tell the stories to myself in my head without ever writing them down, and they would never go through that translational medium.  I write so that those stories I tell myself can be read by other people.  This doesn’t mean that I am writing to attract a large readership, or even that I need or expect a single person to read my stories, but at some fundamental level, I write the stories in my head so that someone else could read them.  Thus, whether I am submitting to contests, submitting to publishers, self-publishing, independently publishing, or simply sharing with a small group, I cannot escape the question of “good enough.”

There’s a very simple answer, of course: a story is good enough when you as an author would be satisfied to share it, and proud of sharing it.  Like most simple answers, though, this one papers over a chasm of complexity and deeper consideration.  If all I said were that a story is good enough when you as an author are proud to share it, this wouldn’t be much of a post, and it wouldn’t be a very helpful answer.  However, to approach a more helpful response, we need to differentiate between two different aspects of this question.  There is a question of if the story is suitable for publication, and there is a question of if the story is satisfactory to you as the author.

If you’re submitting stories to contests, or for other mediums of publication, there is an easy, external method of telling if your story is suitable for publication: whether or not it gets selected.  It’s not a very useful method, though, because so many different factors go into publication decisions: market demand, publisher/judge taste, editorial decisions, target audience, et cetera.  Thus, just because a story you write is rejected from one, two, half a dozen publications, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the story is not suitable for publication, that it’s not “good enough” – only that it wasn’t what those publications were looking for at that particular time.  Therefore, we need some internal method, a way of judging our own work to know when it is “good enough,” whether that be for submission or for some form of self-publishing.

Judging our own work, though, is something of an intractable problem.  Perhaps it’s different for some authors, but for me, I find I am too close to the work.  Letting some time pass between writing and judging the piece can help, but it isn’t perfect, and I often notice that, regardless of if a month or a year has passed, at least for my recent stories my judgement of them is largely a matter of how I’m generally perceiving my writing at the time, so I am inclined to either be too generous towards the story or too harsh, accordingly (for much older stories it’s easier, because I can read them and see very clearly just how much my writing has improved since those early attempts).

Is Charmers especially stronger than other stories I submitted to the same publication but which were rejected?  I don’t perceive it so.  In fact, some of my more recent stories, like Heaven’s War, are stronger in my opinion.  I can try to judge my stories against other authors’ stories which I most respect and enjoy, but that’s not all that helpful, either.  That can be informative and education, and a useful tool for improving my writing, but it’s not very useful for judging the merit of a story.  Stories simply cannot be effectively compared in that objective way, because appreciation and enjoyment of a story is not objective, and stories cannot be holistically similar enough to be usefully compared.

Comparing to other stories, examining stories along one dimension at a time, letting the story “rest” for a time before returning to it: these can all be useful tools to help you judge your own stories, but they aren’t perfect, and they certainly aren’t objective.  Objectively judging your own stories is likely an impossibility, if it is even desirable.  The greatest help in the effort is a writing group, or a reading group, who can provide honest feedback on your work.  Maybe the simple answer is the best, though.  Write the story to a point at which you will be proud of it, and teach yourself to be satisfied with that, whatever you might want to change in the future and regardless of if anyone picks it up for publication.  I write stories so other people can read them, but I’m the one who must be comfortable having written them.