When I was five, I wrote my very first book. It was titled (cough, cough) Cute Little Baby and Cute Little Kid, and it was about a half dozen pages, maybe. It was mostly a few sloppy words with a bunch of stick-figure illustrations, but my kid-self was super, super proud of it.
So why is it that today as an adult, it takes courage to even mention the title? Why am I embarrassed when the subject comes up?
When I was a teenager, my writing priorities took a major shift. I was no longer writing stories just for fun. I had put on a new hat. I wanted to go out there and be a world-changer with my books. Which is totally fine. It’s not wrong to have that desire. But I think rather than writing for myself I started trying to write for everyone.
Yes, I think that did make me more open to being edited and corrected, which may have been a good thing, depending on how you look at it. You NEVER could have gotten away with editing the stories written by my kid-self. My kid-self would have been discouraged and would have probably called it quits. I did not like to be corrected for anything. And that wasn’t wrong, either. I wrote to express myself. I didn’t need anybody editing what I created and telling me if it was good enough. It didn’t have to be “good enough.” I really wasn’t worried about that.
My teenage writing habits were different. I was constantly going backwards to re-edit what I had written and start yet another draft. So much so that I never finished anything. Don’t get me wrong. It was still relentlessly fun. I loved to write, and editing could be pretty great, too. That wasn’t the problem.
The problem was that I was writing stuff that “everybody” would love. And that’s not wrong either, but it’s not particularly fruitful. It has caused me to worry and analyze and often change my words to say what I think people will want to hear instead of expressing what I really want to say.
I remember my teen-self saying that when I finished writing my first novel, I was going to read and re-read it a dozen times, each time as if I were a different family member or friend, one time as an atheist, one time as a super religious person, and would fine-tune my work each time until I had something that everybody was going to love, regardless of age, gender, religion, or belief. It was a foolproof idea and I never got a chance to test it out (thankfully).
And of course, for most of us who have made writing their passion, the error of writing something that absolutely everyone will love is kind of obvious. And yet, I think us writers do it all the time on a subconscious level.
Writing The Duet, for example, has been pretty agonizing. This will be the first time I bite the bullet and actually put a story I wrote—that I love, and care about, and that reflects the struggles that I’ve gone through in the struggles of its characters—into the hands of the public at large. I have a personal rule (as an adult now) that I write every story of mine as if nobody—absolutely nobody—was ever going to read it. I comfort myself with the knowledge that I can “edit the embarrassing parts out if I ever publish it,” even though deep down inside I know the truth that I will probably throw it out there exactly as-is. But by taking away the pressure to write something others will approve of, my own voice comes out more clearly in the process of shaping the story.
For The Duet, I broke this rule. I knew from the start I was writing this one to share. I wanted to tell people what I had learned in these exciting seven years of my life since I started to question whether love was bigger than I knew.
I started off by writing a very excellent short story of the same name, which said basically what I wanted to say without making myself especially vulnerable in any big way. I was planning to put it up on the internet someplace for people to see in hopes that it would start some important conversations about unity versus harmony amongst the folks in my life. But I wasn’t sure where or how I wanted to post that, and eventually I decided it would be cool to self-publish it in book format instead. Print-on-demand makes publishing a book a lot easier than it used to be, and books are a bit more visible and grab people’s attention more than obscure PDFs on the internet tend to do, so I figured, why not?
I ended up showing the story to an author friend of mine who suggested slowing down and taking the time to edit the story a little further if I found the space in my heart to do so. Before long, an expanded story began to take shape in my mind, and I realized that rewriting The Duet was something I wanted to do.
The big problem? Now I knew I was publishing it. Now I knew that I had a dozen people who already knew about the book, waiting to get the chance to read the finished story. I couldn’t follow my “rule.”
I ended up writing an (almost) entirely new book. It was a wonderful process, and also the most excruciating writing project I’ve ever worked on. Because, yes, I couldn’t convince myself that I was the only one who had to read it. And unlike my original short story, this version of the book that I was going to publish for everyone to read wasn’t actually written for everyone. It was written for me. It was full of the deepest parts of impassioned-slightly-bizzare-sometimes-mushy-sometimes-full-of-himself-kind-of-brainy-super-sweet-corny-oddball-rebel-anxious-perfectionist-snowflake-goofball Caleb Quinn. Writing for me and publishing for everyone meant that the age-old refrain “it’s not good enough” kept coming back to haunt me every day as I wrestled with the potential ways people might respond to my book.
I finished my more-or-less final draft of the manuscript during the first half of 2020, and decided to take a hiatus from my publication efforts, which has lasted until the present time. I’m not interested in rushing this. There have been other things in my life that ended up taking precedence over launching Winder Place and publishing The Duet.
But soon, I’m planning to get back at it. And yet the more I consider it, the more I begin to question my work. Tonight I re-read large portions of it again. Is it good enough? Good enough to publish?
But how can anything ever be good enough? How do you measure “good enough”?
What about Cute Little Baby and Cute Little Kid? Was that “good enough”?
Of course it was! Good enough to publish? I’m tempted to say no. But why not?
Honestly, what is it that sets our standards for what “good enough” to publish (or write) even is?
Maybe this question is not really what we desire an answer to. Maybe it’s actually cover for a deeper question that we’re afraid to confront.
Am I good enough?
Suppose I publish The Duet and immediately the one-star Amazon reviews start rolling in. Jacob G. says: “Lousy. Irregular. Hackneyed, and hacked together. In a word, naive.” (Oh wait. That’s an actual review of Melody’s “not good enough” piano piece in The Duet. Want to guess why?) Suppose that my more religious friends and relations lose their heads over the s-word in chapter ten or my somewhat unorthodox theology. Suppose that a typo (GASP!) actually somehow makes it into my book. What have I really lost?
Nothing.
Am I any less of a person?
No!
I’m still me. My book is still my book. I wrote what I set out to write, right?
Then why do I care so much that EVERYBODY likes it? I think it’s because I still seek validation from outside of myself, instead of from my own heart. I attach my value to my performance and skill, and then when that is called into question I assume I must be bad as well. Or I assume that there is some kind of objective standard that makes one book a good book and the other one a bad book. The standard is subjective. The standard is inside of you.
If I write a book, and the only person in the entire universe who loves it is me, that’s great! And if I have good reason to believe that at least one person—one—will read my book and LOVE it too, then I’d say it’s totally worth publishing.
We’re of course not talking about financial considerations here. Publishing a book costs money. If you expect nobody to buy your book, any money you spend to get it published would be something of a waste.
What I’m really trying to say is—write what you want to write. Write stuff you love. Don’t worry about whether this group or that group will like it, or whether it will sell. If you love it, write it. And then when you’re finished, see if it’s on your heart to publish, see if it’s something that will sell, but don’t start with that as your beginning goal if you can help it.
Again I challenge you—DON’T write a book that everybody will love! Write a book that somebody will love. And then if it’s on your heart to share it, do so. For some people, that will mean just printing off a few copies at the UPS Store for some friends. For others, it will mean seeking a publishing contract, or publishing it yourself via print-on-demand. But regardless, take pride in the fact that this is your special work! It will not be enjoyable to everyone. It might not even be enjoyable to hardly anyone at all. It might even be riddled with (GASP!) typos. But if you’re writing for you, then it’s still very good. Not “good” the way that so-and-so thinks it should be, but good the way your heart knows it to be. Even with the typos.
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