When Is Your Writing “Good Enough?”

One’s belief in words, details and precision can lead to perfectionism and rejection. So what’s a writer who aspires to greatness supposed to do?

What Is Good Writing?

When I was a freshman in college, I took an introduction to writing course with a literature professor who had the reputation of being the toughest, most ruthless instructor in the department. He was reputed to be stingy with doling out As (although grade inflation was already a lost cause) and insensitive to students’ entreaties for leniency and compassion. So, of course, that was the class and the teacher I chose to take. I fancied myself a talented writer (hadn’t I won awards for it and been told I was a rare “jewel in the rough” back at my public high school in a small town in South Georgia?) who would impress him and, thus, be vaulted to the heights of academic and, eventually, literary stardom.

Oglethorpe University’s collegiate gothic campus building, modeled after Oxford’s Corpus Christi College, was everything I could imagine for my university debut. As Dr. Brightman entered the room on that sunny September day wearing his faded blue jeans and classic Birkenstocks, he seemed like an amiable mix of erudite imp and aging hippie. The first assignment he gave us seemed easy enough. But it was a trap.

“What is good writing?” he asked us, and then told us that we’d write on the topic. I don’t remember the page count or if there were more defined parameters, but I know that I, like everyone else in the class, was thrown for a loop. I spent the week trying to figure out how to write an essay about the act of writing. I also don’t recall all details of what I wrote in that paper, but I do think I was satisfied that I’d explained how good writing connects with the reader. It conveys emotions or something profound and makes an impact. I turned it in and then waited for the results.

The next class, Dr. Brightman revealed that everyone had failed but there was one paper that had received a D. The horror on our faces! This was a small, private liberal arts school that attracted a cross-section of overachievers who, although we may not have gotten into Ivys or matriculated to a more prestigious name-brand school, still believed in our brilliance. None of us had ever received anything close to a C in years—and especially not in a writing course. It was comical to then see us all vie for that D. None of us could be complete losers.

“The grades don’t matter,” he then confessed with a wicked grin. “The writing does.”

His point, I eventually came to understand, was that we had all tried to explain what “good writing” was rather than do it. The only way we could have impressed him in our essays was to actually have done the thing that we purported to understand. In short, our writing should have been better. The assignment may have been a bit of pedagogical shock-and-awe, but the lesson stuck with me. It’s a question I’ve been asking and attempting to answer for the past thirty years.

Rejection Makes You Feel Like Shit—But Doesn’t Mean You’re a Failure

Only recently have I started to promote an idea of “good enough” writing. And that’s because “good writing” is a subjective thing. When I receive a rejection—and let’s face it, the majority of writers’ lives is about handling rejection—I interrogate everything. Every word choice or grammatical decision is a clue; every linguistic flourish is a potential culprit. My attempt to ferret out the offending part, to make it “perfect,” is undertaken in a vain hope that it will never happen again.

It’s also why I have dozens of short stories, just as many personal essays, and more random scrivenings locked away as Google docs, on thumb drives (and probably some floppy disks), or tucked into folders that have never been published. Yes, part of that is due to gatekeeping by editors and opaque publishing guidelines. Some of the writings are juvenile or half-baked and need more time to gestate or for me to gain new insights. Yet the reason many of these good pieces of writing remain unpublished can be attributed to an embarrassment that my ideas and confabulations aren’t “good enough” because an anonymous other said, “Sorry, but no,” and I scurried away like a crab and didn’t try again.