On being a ‘good enough’ writer

This is by far the most common phrase I hear in my writing world. We spend much of our writing life so conscious of all the things we don’t know that we are sure other writers do, so much so that along with not being good enough we are tricked into thinking there is a right way to write – and inevitably we’re clearly doing it wrong.

This certainty that we are not good enough bleeds into our writing. It makes us question ourselves, convinces us that we are terrible writers, and can eventually prevent us from putting words on the page at all. I’ve been through this cycle countless times. My initial attempts at stories are weak and unoriginal, the writing is sub-par and I simply can’t live up to all the amazing writing out there in the world. In short: I’m just not good enough.

If you ask any writer it’s a pretty safe bet that they have also felt this incredible burden of expectation and inadequacy, and it doesn’t stop existing just because authors have been published and are a now a multi-million copy bestseller. If anything, it ups the ante, because now they have readers to please and comparative authors to ‘compete’ with in the ‘good enough’ stakes! Am I good enough to be on the New York Top Ten List with *insert your fave author here*?

The thing we rarely stop and think about, though, is what we actually mean by ‘good enough’. It has become a never-ending yardstick by which we measure ourselves that has no discernible unit. Take a second to think about what good enough means for you…I doubt it will be the same as the conditions I classify for myself when defining good enough. In reality it won’t even be the same expectation we had of ourselves last month or even last year. Because the second we are good enough, the goalposts shift and somehow we’re still just as far away from the goal as we were before.

Not being good enough hits us so hard because we can apply the extremes to every situation. Our writing isn’t good enough because it’s too plain, or overly descriptive; our characters aren’t as vibrant on the page as they are in our head; the story is unoriginal or has an expected twist; no one will publish it. And, of course, the clincher – my writing isn’t as good as….*insert other writer here*.

But it’s this lack of concrete meaning that gives our interpretation power over us. And so the trick is to recognise that without any specific boundary or understanding of what this phrase means for you ‘good enough’ becomes a beacon of ideal proportion that we can never live up to. Without a target to aim for we will always miss.

And of course, there’s the obvious:

Who are we to judge the stories that we write? Surely it is the role of the reader to decide if they enjoy the experience or not? We are not the reader, ergo we cannot objectively decide if our writing is ‘good enough’ or not. Certainly not when we don’t have a set of criteria that helps to define what good enough means, and let’s face it – everyone’s criteria will be different. So why worry about it?

So whenever it comes up, challenge it, be wary of this phrase and caution yourself against using it. Decide what it means for you and stick with that definition. Don’t get sidetracked with other people’s vague interpretations and don’t fall into the trap of expanding the interpretation every time your writing can be measured as ‘good enough’.

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