The Thursday! Newsletter 1-45: What's Good and What's Good Enough
Volume 1, Issue 45
I have a problem with the quality of my art.
This probably won't surprise any of you who have known me for longer than a week or two. I'm not particularly shy about telling the world when I make something I don't think is very good. I tend toward excessive self-criticism and bouts of flat-out despair when I can't make things as good as I want them to be. Maybe you've been there, too. Maybe you've been in that dark and confusing place where you've done your very best and the thing you have created sits before you, horrid and misshapen. A digital conveyor accident. The hottest of all possible messes. It doesn't take long, though, before you've decided that you, too, are horrid and misshapen. You suck. You can't make anything good. How could you when you worked hard and well on your craft and made something...like that?
Maybe you're still there. You've been working diligently, studying what the experts who have come before you have to say, examining your creative process, clearing your mind of distractions, setting aside dedicated time, and everything else you think you need to do GREAT work. You bend yourself to your art, give the best of yourself, and what you get is...not what you imagined. It's okay. Probably. Maybe. It certainly isn't great. It certainly doesn't look very good. It isn't hideous if you squint and get the right light on it, but it certainly feels hideous to you because it's supposed to be so much better!
So you sit there, in front of what feels like an abject failure and you wonder what the heck you were thinking when you decided you could make something cool.
Like I said, I've been there. Often. Yet here I am, writing a poem a day and sharing them with the world even though I know darned well they won't all be great or even particularly good. Some of them might just be bad. Who knows?
And there -- right there -- is the big question. Who can you trust to tell you whether what you've done is good or not? We all have rather large crowds from which we could pull likely candidates -- friends and family, trusted associates, other artists, strangers who like the kind of thing we make, even the commercial market. How do we sift the reliable opinions from the unreliable (which may well include our own)?
I'm going to cut about a thousand words off this essay with just two: We can't. We have no reliable external meter of quality. We will never, ever collect a consistent "focus group" of opinions to tell us that the story we just wrote is really good or really "meh".
That's not to say we shouldn't have a couple few folks to whom we can turn to get a good opinion. We should have folks like that. I do. I have three close and dear friends whose opinions I value more than a large basket full of gold. I ask them to look over most of what I write before it ever sees the public light of day. They can tell me if there are any structural holes or dead spots or things that don't make sense. They point out the rough areas or places where I wasn't clear because I was too close to the story. They can't, however, tell me if what I wrote was "good". Likewise, we can gather a certain number of opinions into a group -- that is, we can say at some point that most people are likely to think what we write is "good", for whatever definition of the word they hold.
We then run into another problem. If you could take those people who agreed what we wrote was "good", you wouldn't get a single, consistent definition of the word from them. Everyone decides "good" for themselves and many times they use "that's good" for "I like it". They're not determining quality, necessarily, but preference. Some people won't like what you do because they don't like your style or the subject matter or even the particular form you use. You might write great novels but that won't get a "good" rating from a lot of people who prefer short stories or comic books or movies. We reading snobs like to say "the book is better", but clearly most people don't believe that or book sales of a particular story in a given year wouldn't lag so far behind movie ticket sales of that same story. A person might try to be objective and say "Well, it's certainly a good book but it's not my style". That's helpful but it doesn't do much for the poor author who is desperately trying to earn back her advance or who is trying to claw her way to the top of the Amazon chart for that coveted Number One banner.
Let's cut to the chase: no one can tell me if anything I write is "good" because there is no such thing as "good". Quality in art is subjective. Put three Picasso paintings in front of ten art critics and ask them to pick the best one. Do you think they'll come to an agreement? A consensus? A majority view? Nah. Even in creative genres that are "plug and play", you can't get a single definition for "good". Cozy mystery stories like you'd get from Agatha Christie, Ruth Ware, and Kim Watt have a formula. They require certain elements in a certain order and certain characters who do certain things. That doesn't mean you can follow the formula all the way to "good". Amazon is stuffed full of mediocre cozy mysteries that follow all the forms and check all the boxes.
So here we are. There is no objective measure for artistic quality. There is no "good", only "good enough". What, then, do we do? Are we stuck just guessing whether anything we do will do what we intend it to do? Unfortunately, yeah. We can't see so we have to guess, except our guess need not be blind. We know we don't have to hit the small and moving target of "good". We don't have to fling out art into the void and hope for the best. What "good enough" means is that we must do the best work we can and send it out knowing it can compete with everything else out there. We make what we make and set it forth to accomplish whatever we created it to do. We put our best effort forward every time, no matter if we have a week to work on it or an hour. We are professionals and that means we do our best. We never mail it in. We produce top-notch art that someone could be proud to have and to share. We can't know if we've made "good" but we can certainly know if we've done the best we can with the constraints placed upon us at the time. We can certainly know whether our story or poem or illustration of sculpture is good enough to compete with the others. Maybe it's not the best. Maybe it's not the tenth best. But it could be. And that is more than enough.
Every year, athletes hit their respective fields and courts and rinks with the goal of being the best that season. They believe they are, but they can't know, not until they've competed a while. Sometimes bad luck knocks them out of contention. Sometimes others are better than they. Sometimes they really are the best around and nothing's ever going to keep them down. They celebrate or evaluate and do some more work and the next season comes around. Over the years, season after season, game after game, they accumulate a record and a career.
Same for you. Same for me. We make our art and we launch it. It competes with every other piece of art out there and does what it does. We make another. Launch another. It competes. Some do very well. Some don't do so well. Some get knocked down by luck and some get elevated by luck. Work after work, piece by piece, day by day, we accumulate a career as an artist. You can't know whether what you've done is "good" but you can certainly know if it's good enough to compete with the others. That's all you can do. Make your art. Make it the best you can. Let it go. Help it along. Make some more. Do it again.
You're an artist, not a machine. Be good enough to belong and don't sweat "good". That really is the heart of all art, at least from what I can see.
Oh, and I already think you're good enough. Time for you to see it, too.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
What I Wrote Last Week
"If I Could Give" is a poem about love and obeying the laws of physics.
"The Saddest Man in My Town" speaks for itself, I think.
"A Capable Brick" is a poem about you and me.
"Semordnilap: A Noitucac" is the oddest thing I've ever written, but not the oddest thing I'll ever write.
"What My Friend is Not" is a poem about a wonderful friend who isn't several things.
"Every Day" is a poem you might want to keep handy, as a reminder.
"Meow, Wrote the Poet" may well be the most silly thing I've written, which is quite a high bar.
"And the Walls Came Tumbling Down" is an actual story! Hooray! Bet you thought I forgot how to write those.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
One Last Thing
This is where I ask you to help me out. I can't share Thursday! nearly as well as you can so if you know someone who might like what we have here, forward this along or send them to the archives.
You can also buy or share my cool book, give it a solid review, or get an autographed copy (ask and I'll tell you how!).
If you're seeing Thursday! for the first time, HI! I'm glad to meet you. If you want more, subscribe right here.
As always, you can always talk back to me by hitting the reply button! I can't promise I'll always answer back, because I'm quite forgetful, but I'll read everything you send.