The End, Take 3

A friend asked me over lunch, "How do you know when your writing's good enough?"

I'd just admitted to her that some of my finished stories were filed away, never to be seen by anyone else's eyes, because I knew they weren't good enough.

Writers vacillate between overweeing pride in their literary babies and bleak despair that the letters they string together are no better than infant-babble. Even so, I like to think I have a decent sense of "good enough to get noticed on an editor's desk" from the works I've gotten published and the works I haven't. (Editors are like predators. They will sniff out your uncertainty and pounce upon the vulnerabilities you're aware of.) But what I ended up trying to describe instead to my friend was "I know it's really good for me as a reader."

There have been a couple of stories that I knew were pitch-perfect once I wrapped them up, and when I read them even years later, they make me happy. I imagine that that sort of ringing joy comes from a work that hits all your buttons and slips past your critical defenses and makes you enjoy it as a reader, not a writer.

For me, it's highly dependent upon having a storyline with just the right bounds: a lilting beginning, a quiet yet powerful ending with a sweet aftertaste. Not every plot can be told in such a way. But I've done it, and I can't stop trying to do it again.

So the current work-in-progress is undergoing its third ending revamp, because I feel as though hovering just out of reach is a glorious closing. I'm not just aiming for "good enough." I'm gunning for "good."

So: back to the word processor…

(Then again: there is S. J. Kincaid's story of The Best Book I'll Ever Write. But onward without doubt! Remember the predators.)