“Am I a good enough writer?”
Yes, we are.
Whenever I read something published on Medium I like to imagine the author writing it. How long did it take for them to write it? What’s their writing process like? Did they write it on a desk, or sit on a sofa and type away on a laptop? Did they pace around the room — like I often do — trying to replace maybe three words that just aren’t good enough?
The other day my concentration was broken by a car passing by my window, honking very loudly. That’s a very human thing, I think. We’re not machines, we don’t work by receiving a prompt and a coin, and immediately outputting text. What we write is subject to our obsession with having it be just right, and sometimes it’s hard to get into, and maintain, the right mindset to write something you like.
I don’t mean to generalise or assume that everyone who reads this article thinks the same way I do. Maybe some of you find it really easy to write good articles.
But I think it’s fair to assume that everyone here at least wants to create something that they think is good, or at least good enough.
It’s not really about the ease of writing, but the bars we set for ourselves. And sometimes we set them too high. Way, way too high.
We’ve all heard “so what if they don’t like it? what matters is if YOU liked it.”
But the problem is that I don’t like it. We don’t like it. We very much dislike what we write.
So maybe it’s time to stop being our worse critics. Maybe if we repeat the same word thrice in the same paragraph it doesn’t make us a failure at writing. Maybe we made a pun and it fell flat, so what?
We’re good authors. Good enough for us, good enough for them, and good enough to keep writing. No maybes, just certainties.
