There are two parts to writing a good book: writing skills and editing skills. If your critical skills - the ability to see what is wrong and how it might be fixed - are lagging behind your writing skills, your work will be as good as you can make it. At that point, you need third party input - critters, agents, editors - to give you a perspective of how it stands up in the marketplace.
If your critting skills are ahead of your writing skills, and you can see that something isn't quite there yet, but you cannot make it better, you'll be more frustrated, but you've also reached the point where you need to send it out into the world because you're more likely to acquire the necessary skills writing something new.
There very demonstrably *is* such a thing as 'good enough' in publishing - books that hit the right button for their intended audience. And conversely, there are beautifully written, polished-to-perfection books that just aren't right for the market.
I like citing this photo: it's technically near-perfect, but no amount of photographic skill would have turned it into something you want hanging on your wall. Even if you turned it completely inside out with photoshop, it would still be of limited artistic merit.
Writing can be like that. (And sometimes, grr, the market does not like the kinds of books you like to read/write, so the message to those writers is 'you're not good enough' when it ought to be 'youre very good at producing something I don't like, so I won't buy it however brilliant it is'. We all have preferences like that.)
For me, a work is done when I can't see how to make it better and instead shuffle deckchairs on the Titanic. I don't go through the 'I loathe it' phase, but there's a point of diminuished returns - and most writers need to stop believing that there is such a thing as perfection, because, well, art is subjective, and no two people will entirely agree on any complex work of art.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2009-07-21 10:46 am (UTC)If your critting skills are ahead of your writing skills, and you can see that something isn't quite there yet, but you cannot make it better, you'll be more frustrated, but you've also reached the point where you need to send it out into the world because you're more likely to acquire the necessary skills writing something new.
There very demonstrably *is* such a thing as 'good enough' in publishing - books that hit the right button for their intended audience. And conversely, there are beautifully written, polished-to-perfection books that just aren't right for the market.
I like citing this photo: it's technically near-perfect, but no amount of photographic skill would have turned it into something you want hanging on your wall. Even if you turned it completely inside out with photoshop, it would still be of limited artistic merit.
Writing can be like that. (And sometimes, grr, the market does not like the kinds of books you like to read/write, so the message to those writers is 'you're not good enough' when it ought to be 'youre very good at producing something I don't like, so I won't buy it however brilliant it is'. We all have preferences like that.)
For me, a work is done when I can't see how to make it better and instead shuffle deckchairs on the Titanic. I don't go through the 'I loathe it' phase, but there's a point of diminuished returns - and most writers need to stop believing that there is such a thing as perfection, because, well, art is subjective, and no two people will entirely agree on any complex work of art.