How to Measure the Unmeasurable

Recently, Electric Literature’s Q @ A blog tackled the common question: how can a writer know if his or her writing is good? The answer was thorough and even-handed, and reminded the writer that there’s no such thing as objective “good” in art and that work can get rejected for any number of reasons.

When I hear fledgling writers ask seasoned writers, “How do you know if you’re any good,” my first thought is always, “If you have to ask, you’re probably not.” Okay, that’s a little snarky, and it’s surely not always true, but the question is not one I can relate to at all. I know I’m a good writer because my work gets published. I know I’m a good writer because people read my stories, then send me emails telling me they liked them and why. I win contests, or get named a finalist, or earn honorable mentions. Editors nominate my stories for Pushcarts. I know I’m a good writer, in other words, because I’ve received feedback from the world.

This doesn’t mean I’m a literary genius or that there aren’t still plenty of ways in which I could stand to improve—I’m not, and there are. But any time I stop to think about those areas I want to work on, I don’t spiral into self-doubt the way it sounds like some writers do. I know my weaknesses, but I know my strengths too.

But then again, my experiences as an editor have taught me how subjective writing is and how hard it can be to rise to the top of a slush pile. Is there really any way to know you’re good, if you haven’t been lucky enough to stumble into positive feedback the way I have?

How to know, how to know.

How about this? Let’s think about how we figure out another subjective thing about ourselves: whether other people find us attractive. Yes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that cliché stuff, but for the sake of exploration, let’s think about concrete assessments of that subjective quality: physical beauty. The psychological theory of the matching hypothesis suggests that, in spite of how subjective physical attractiveness is, we do tend to pair up with people who are generally considered about as attractive as we are.

What happens is that our options for mating are limited by other people’s perceptions of our physical beauty. No human exists who every single person in every culture agrees is attractive, but there are people who tend to be considered attractive by more people than others. We all know the mirror lies to us, so the only way we can really get a handle on whether others find us attractive is by the feedback we receive out in the real world.

A study aired on the Discovery Channel shows how this feedback occurs.

To mimic the feedback we receive in the real world, participants were assigned numbers from one to ten, which other participants could see but they themselves could not. They were then given the task of pairing up with the highest possible number they could. Naturally, everybody tried to pair with the highest numbers—the nines and tens—and based on people’s responses, they began to get a sense of what their own numbers were. The higher numbers paired off with each other, and the lower numbers were stuck with the other lower numbers.

This video is meant to be a simulated version of what happens to all of us as we’re looking for and finding partners in life. People who are considered unattractive by more people don’t have the luck that people who are considered attractive do. The attractive people have lots of options. They get rejected less and are propositioned more. Over time, they begin to realize that people find them attractive, just as the people who are found attractive less often develop a sense that they are probably not that great looking. Both groups can still encounter people who will find them attractive (and both groups can encounter people who don’t), so the point is not to suggest that beauty is objective. I just mean that even something as subjective as physical beauty can be measured by the feedback we receive from the world around us.

So can we apply that same logic to writing? Well, yes and no. In writing, if you’re getting positive feedback from the world—if your work is continually getting published, if readers like your work and are willing to spend their precious time reading what you have to say—then yes, you can use that as an assessment measure: you are a good writer in many people’s opinions. Yes, it’s still subjective. Yes, there will still be people who don’t like your work. But if you want to know should you give up or are you good enough that you should keep at it, the answer is pretty clear.

The negative feedback you might receive, though, is much harder to decode. Whereas with physical attraction, if nobody ever seems much interested in dating you, you can make a pretty safe assumption about how attractive most people find you, in the writing world, you might get rejected for any number of reasons that have little or nothing to do with your actual work. An editor may have only read the first sentence of your story before rejecting it. An editor may have read the whole thing but been in a particularly distracted state of mind. An editor may have read it and liked it, but just felt it wasn’t right for his or her particular journal, or maybe it went through several editors, some of whom liked it while others didn’t. And when it comes to agents and book publishers, things get even foggier. Agents and publishers may reject things they think are well-written, things they personally like but are rejecting because they don’t think they will be able to sell it.

So negative feedback (or, as is often the case, no feedback) doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not any good. However, as someone who’s been through lots and lots and lots of rejection to get where I am today, I do suspect that there may be a point where you maybe should begin to wonder, if you’re really being honest with yourself, why your stuff keeps getting rejected. These days, when I write a story and I know it’s good, I can count on it getting accepted fairly quickly. When I write a story and I sort of deep down inside know that it’s not ready, it gets rejected and rejected and rejected until I stop submitting it and get back to work on it.

This internal gauge of my own work’s quality has come after years of writing and revising and submitting, but I do think if you’ve been writing and submitting for a while and you’re not having any luck, and you honestly don’t have any sense of whether what you’re writing is any good, that’s probably not a good sign. It might mean that you aren’t an active enough reader to have much understanding of craft and what you subjectively think is good writing; or it might mean that you haven’t taken the time to think about what sort of thing you even want to be writing; or it might mean that your work is derivative and dull, second-rate mimicry of writers more skilled than you. None of these things necessarily mean you have to give up—all writers are bad writers first—but if any (or heaven forbid, all!) of these qualities are the case with you, it does mean you’re probably not a “good” writer, not yet. It means you need to keep working at it if you want to achieve that slightly less subjective “good” where many people consider you a good writer.

Or you may decide you don’t care what other people think—you’ll write however you want, and as long as you’re happy, it’s good to you. True! Because, as Electric Literature pointed out, there is no such thing as “good” writing. What makes you “good” is based mostly on what your goals are. Do you want to get published? Do you want people to enjoy reading what you’re writing? Or do you want to write for your own enjoyment and don’t care whether it ever reaches a wider audience? These are all reasonable objectives, and only your own personal objectives can determine how you should assess the quality of your own work.

If your goal is to publish, though, if your goal is to be considered “good” by readers, you have to set your ego aside and let the feedback the world is sending you count for something. It doesn’t have to count for everything, but it is one of the only means of real feedback you’ve got available, so you should at least pay attention and consider what it might mean.

June 4, 2016

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