Can I Write a Book? Can I Publish an Essay? Is This Any Good?
Yes.
Image credit: Shixart1985
Writers often ask me if what they’re working on is going to amount to anything. Questions like “Can I finish this book?” or “Can I write a literary essay?” come up often. The answer, from my perspective, is always yes. Writing well isn’t about who wrote the best first draft or whether that draft came easily. It really is about whether you’re willing to keep experimenting, to keep moving drafts forward, and to stay curious.
As an exercise, I recently looked back at the first drafts of a few of the poems I’m proudest of. I figured that the poems had likely pretty much come out whole, with minor edits along the way. I remembered writing them easily, and not having to edit much.
The drafts told a different story. They were thin, unimpressive, without the richness or meaning I later produced. If I had taken those drafts to a workshop and said “tell me if this sucks,” as new writers sometimes do, someone might have obliged, told me everything that was “wrong” with them, and I would have worked to fix those things, instead of pushing the poem towards what I wanted it to be.
I opened my third, fourth, and tenth drafts and found that along the way I had often misstepped, had written in ideas or lines that didn’t fit at all. That happens too.
So when clients ask me “Is this any good?” what I want to say is there really is no good or bad, there is just writing at various stages in the process. If you want to work at it, you can make it into what you want it to be.
I don’t really think there are good and bad writers either. Certainly, I’ve read lots of published writing that I don’t like. But I’ve now seen too many times writers I judged harshly as mediocre work at their craft and produce amazing results.
This is, in some ways, annoying advice. People want to be told whether their efforts are worth it before they put in tens or hundreds of hours of work. I want to also (it’s why my novel still isn’t finished). But that question is a stopping point, not a beginning. It’s looking for a definition (am I “good” or “bad”), and maybe also for a way out of what can be a difficult and uncomfortable process.
Better questions might be “I wonder where I can go with this?” or “What else can I put in here?” or even “Who do I want to write like?” Those questions get you back to curiosity, to reading great work, to wandering and experimentation. That’s where you want to be when you’re writing.
But if you want to know my answer to “Can I do this?”, the answer is always yes.
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