As a musician, a filmmaker, a screenwriter, and as an author, I talk to people who share the same interests and drive to create. There is always a lot of enthusiasm about creating, but often less enthusiasm about what they’ve created. I often get some variation of, “I don’t really know if my writing is any good,” or the assertive, “My writing’s not very good.”
There are two common reasons I hear this.
The first is an excuse as to why nothing they’ve done is accessible. You can’t read their work because it isn’t shared anywhere. It’s being kept private because they’re not confident about it and they’re afraid to find out whether others think it’s good or not. As long as it stays hidden there’s a distance and safety there.
The second is pre-emptive. They’ve decided they’re going to share something. Rather than risk being told their work is bad, they get out in front of it. If it doesn’t hit, they were right. It works as an apology for subjecting an audience to imperfection.
The most appropriate response when someone says their writing isn’t any good is, “Who gives a shit?”
Truly, I do not care if your writing is objectively bad. Chances are it’s probably not and even if it is, you’re not mass producing hardcover editions of it and expecting me to pay $50 for the privilege of reading it. You’re sharing something you’ve created with me. Probably because you like me as a person, want to impress someone with what you’ve written, or are hoping to get some feedback. All of which is important. What’s not important is whether you can objectively determine if your writing is any good.
When you are sharing your art with someone it does not matter whether it’s good or not. Being bad at something is the first step towards being good at something. Exposing your work to others allows them the opportunity to help you see the problems and to improve. You can study, reflect, and persist as much as you’d like. Few things help us grow like outside interference or performance.
We have this sickness where we compare ourselves to the best attributes of the brightest and most successful people we know. Except that we are now capable of being connected to absolutely anyone in the world. This means we can pick and choose the shiniest parts of the shiniest people, create an amalgamation that doesn’t exist in the real world, and use that metric that no one can ever measure up to as a cudgel to beat ourselves down.
You have to be willing to be bad at something in order to figure out how to be good.
One of my favourite video genres is backflip fails. It doesn’t matter how unhappy I am, a good backflip fail video will cheer me up every single time. They’re always the same. There’s no variation or deviation from the standard. That’s what makes them so beautiful to me.
- Someone attempts a backflip.
- It goes horribly awry.
- They push themselves up to their feet, typically a little dazed.
- They all, without exception, have the same baffled expression on their face.
That confusion tells the whole story.
They’d never performed or attempted a backflip before that moment. Despite this they were absolutely certain they were going to absolutely nail it. They went into it with all the unearned confidence they were capable of carrying and sent it. In their head, they’d already succeeded. The reality that they hadn’t was then incomprehensible to them.
“I don’t know if my writing is any good” is the opposite of this. It is accepting failure before the attempt has even been made. The writing isn’t the failure. Being bad at writing isn’t the failure. The willingness to accept failure is the failure.
There are going to be enough people in your life that will tell you that it’s unreasonable or impossible or that you’re just not talented enough. You do not need to be one of them. If it matters to you, if you care about it, then pursue it. Recognize that you’re going to be bad. You’re also going to create pieces that you think are good. Things that others also think are good. You’re going to think you’ve figured it all out. Then you’re going to make something bad again and wonder if you’ve learned anything at all.
That’s part of the process.
I’m not going tell you that if you just grind you’re going to end up being the artist you dream of being. That’s unreasonable. But I will tell you that if you care about it and you’re willing to actually tackle it you will find places you didn’t realize were possible.
All that’s waiting for you at the end of avoidance is nothing and you deserve better than that.