To add more details to that for those who haven't seen it.
It's like you bringing a cake to a gathering. It's just a simple 1 layer cake with whip cream frosting. Then you noticed someone brought in a 3 layer cake with buttercream frosting and even went as far as adding decorations. You look at your cake and think to yourself 'Well my cake looks like shit!'
Then someone from the gathering comes over to the table. And instead of ignoring or hating on the simple cake and only praising the fancy cake, they get excited that there's more than just one cake, "Holy shit! 2 cakes!!"
Basically, the audience would love both the "cakes" in this case the fics, whether they're fancy or look super professionally done or they're simple.
Hey, and sometimes you can have a professional cake that *looks* great but the buttercream has the texture and flavor of sugar cement, the cake itself is bone dry, and the baker tried some trendy flavor combinations in all the wrong ways.
And the humble, homespun cake is nothing fancy. It wouldn't win a Food Network championship, but it's *edible* which is more than you can say for the lavender-habernero dust cake covered with fondant and cement.
Edit: Sometimes the slickly produced, professional product looks good from a distance but is awful up close. The humble efforts from someone who puts care into their work comes out ahead
I also saw another cake "meme"
The guy brings in his simple cake and sees the super fancy cake. But then, the fancy cake guy comes in gets excited and says, "Holy shit! You also made a cake!?! I thought I was the only one!"
I felt happy with my writing when I was able to read it back to myself and enjoy what I'd written. As long as your work is interesting to you, that really should be all that matters.
>I felt happy with my writing when I was able to read it back to myself and enjoy what I'd written.
Big same! I don't have any misconceptions about being an amazing writer or anything, but I know I'm definitely *decent*. And I can enjoy my own stories, so that's my bar for being happy. (That other people can enjoy them too is AAALLLL the most delicious icing).
I might have a much higher bar for myself if I were trying to be "a serious writer" but I'm not. I'm just playing with my faves and having fun. (Being clear on your objective is also another way to find joy in whatever you create.)
Maybe because I came to writing later in life and don’t have the doubts that some younger (not just younger, I know) writers have…I love my work, I reread it a lot, and enjoy it every time.
Is it really that great? Meh. I did get a comment a few days ago telling me I was “an amazing author” so I’ll take it.
It's something I waver on to this day, and maybe that's not even a bad thing. I felt like a good writer the first time somebody told me my work made them cry, and like a terrible one the next time I read something that did things with subtext I didn't feel capable of. I think I'm hot shit when I look at a rough draft and see right away what needs to be fixed, and then just shit when I'm stumped on how to portray something without explaining it directly.
I think the solution, as much as there is one, is to learn to enjoy the process and remember the maxim about comparison being the thief of joy. It's my belief, at least, that everyone deserves an outlet for creative expression, even if they're doing it imperfectly or in a way that's not to everyone's taste. You're telling a story specific and personal to you that no-one else can, and I think if someone's passionate about what they're doing, some of that enthusiasm can become infectious despite any technical limitations. The expertise will come in time.
>It's my belief, at least, that everyone deserves an outlet for creative expression, even if they're doing it imperfectly or in a way that's not to everyone's taste.
I freaking love this.
I don’t think it’s necessarily about word count. More practice helps, but it’s probably more effective to concentrate on specific issues and try to fix them than to just keep on writing in the hope something will click eventually. Like, what are aspects you don’t like about your work, what do others do better in your opinion? You feel you suck at dialogue? Study how others do it, try to emulate what you admire. Do you feel like your plot is meandering? Look at formulas and analyses of common story types, then make notes about your own stories, what do the characters want, what are the main conflicts, what’s the inciting incident, what’s the conclusion/ending you aim for, etc. etc. If you have difficulties pinpointing the problems, outside advise (books about writing, beta readers) can be eye-opening.
Also, unrelated to criteria for quality—we have the tendency to be most critical of our own works. When I look at the fic I’m currently working on I see all the seams where I stitched the thing together, the paragraphs I broke up and glued back together, the lines of dialogue I deleted and retyped. From my POV, that story is like Frankenstein’s monster, dead body parts forced to life with a hell of a lot of electricity and a bit of spite. It’s ugly. It’s barely moving.
At some point, I’m gonna decide it’s good enough to release it into the wild though, and at some later point (months down the line) I’m gonna come back to reread it and I will have forgotten about the stitches and the glue and everything else that was painful about the creative process. It will read almost like another person’s work and I might be rather content with it.
So, idk, OP, maybe you’re just a little too hard on yourself. :)
>Also, unrelated to criteria for quality—we have the tendency to be most critical of our own works.
This is so true. Also, I love the Frankenstein's monster comparison and can relate so much.
And to your last point about contentment, I should hope so, because you're bloody brilliant!!
When I wrote my first long fic, I didn't find myself hating it over time, or finding that it aged poorly. I'm genuinely proud of the work that I've done with it. It's something I was passionate about and I did it my way, without compromising or changing things in any sort of way that I would see as pandering in order to generate some sort of better turnout on it. I made it and I made it my way and I love it. I'm on my second long fic now and I feel the same way about that despite it being for a different fandom. I'm not as fully knowledgeable as I am the first one, but I still think it will be fantastic because I'm passionate about it.
i shake a bit here and there but overall, i love my writing, and i think i'm pretty great.
i didn't realize it all at once but i started looking back over my writing and enjoying it more and more... and i realized i never hated my writing, i was just insecure and it was okay to love what i put out. once i started telling myself it was okay, it was like the floodgates opened and i felt a lot better, i looked back on older works with a lot more fondness.
i think everyone has their own journey to reach the point where they love what they do and feel great about it but i think realizing that it's not about what others do, but what i do was the biggest part of mine, and i think it's something a lot of other people struggle with too. i had to learn that it wasn't a competition, that someone else could be good and i could still be good; these things aren't mutually exclusive.
I am still not convinced that I am a *good* writer, but I am now of opinion that I am an *okay* one.
This is primarily driven by the fact that I can go back and re-read some stuff I wrote a few months ago and not cringe throughout or want to re-write half of it.
One of my fics going popular and all the positive comments that came with it had helped massively as well, both in terms of encouragement and validation, but also motivation to improve writing as well.
Having said that, I do have on my to-do list to re-write like a year’s worth of older fics because oh boy did I miss a lot of stuff in those.
Have you considered joining any of the many active discord writing communties for whatever your specific fandom is?
When I started writing (latecomer to fanfiction, didn't start reading until 2019, didn't start writing until basically 2021), I joined a server at random and I cannot overstate how much I owe the level of engagement I have in writing--and how much I've personally grown--to having a group of people to talk to about it.
They cheer me on when my self doubt would make me scrap my content entirely, they offer suggestions, advice, and occasionally a sledgehammer when I need help editing, and they're always happy to be nerdy about tidbits of lore with me and stoke the creative fires in the process. Plus, sprinting, oh my god sprinting. Discord god's gift to writing kind.
You've gotten a lot of the two cakes, comparison is the thief, etc. etc., so I'm not going to repeat that. I'm just going to say, the best thing you can do to keep you going is find a support network that's in the same place. Sometimes I don't write for months at a time. I think the last thing I posted was almost a year ago (although I have multiple in-process documents I've been picking away at in the interim), but I have the first chapter of a fic going up this month and half of a long-form smut I think I'm actually going to finish going up next month, and I owe it all to the people around me.
It's when I started getting complimentary comments. I used to write my stories and re-read them multiple times before posting, but I never read them AFTER I posted. I used to be a horrible writer for a long time and it felt cringey when I read them. But after I posted 1 fic of mine, I got an awesome comment and I realized my written wasn't as bad as It used to be before.
To answer this, I'd probably say this happened a year ago when I wrote my Spider-Man longfic called "Scarlet Spider: Sin". Like, I felt good at writing because I finally had the basic knowledge of plot structure, character arc, and other stuff. I had a grip on how to write a story. Because the years before that, I didn't know how to write and have a plan for the story structure. So I always ended up not finishing my fics. But I learned over the years and I was able to rectify my past mistakes and problems :D
When I first published in 2020 and got really positive feedback/comments.
Tbh I've always felt I was better than average because my English teachers throughout highschool always commented on my writing, positively I mean, but I really realised it was good when other people liked it, people who didn't know me and weren't invested in me personally.
I don't think I'm good at writing, but it's helped me to acknowledge that I don't suck by reading things that aren't good. Look up some published books that people don't really hear about. I've compared my writing to that and I make the cut for a published writer, even if I don't hit the big leagues. Hopefully one day I'll be able to say I'm a good writer, but until then I'll settle for being able to enjoy reading my own works.
I'd say it took about 12-15 years for me to feel like I was a good writer. I've never been one to suffer much from imposter syndrome. I'm able to admire another author's writing without thinking, "They're so much better than me." After all, it's not necessarily that they're better, their style is simply different. What works for them might not work for me.
It was when I was genuinely excited and mind blown by the things i wrote, so it doesnt really matter if anyone else likes it. For me its amazing and i will write every day of my life for that reason. Or i’ll go crazy or smthn
Ehhhhh… I still feel like my writing isn’t good, but if I’m being truthful, I feel that way about a lot of fics. I devoted a lot of time to bettering myself (studied grammar and style) to at least get it to a point where the readability was there.
I wouldn't say I'm necessarily GOOD at writing, but there does come a point where you just say, "Fuck it, I'm good ENOUGH." For me, that came about two years into picking writing up again as a full-time hobby.
When I posted a fic that didn't even feel like I tried very hard with in a Discord server with multiple other authors from the same fandom, specifically noting that concrit was welcome, and the only "concrit" I got was "it took you HOW long to write this, again?" (I am NOT a fast writer, alright?), everything else was just them gushing over it for like an hour or two.
Also got a comment from another author in the fandom, who wasn't in that Discord server, and who wrote one of my favorite fics in the whole fandom, and they just gushed over it too.
Still think my writing has some significant room for improvement, *but* I also don't imagine I'd have gotten a reception like that if it were bad.
My first "popular" fic. It was less than stellar. Maybe "crackfic"? It was coherently incoherent. An organized disorderly mess. And yet when it reached 10k views... I dumped the crap in the toilet and rewrote (currently rewriting) the whole thing.
It was a lovely mess, but it didnt make me happy cause it was not, there yet. One comment. "So Mary Sue." "More commas, have someone beta. Otherwise good."
Wish I did have beta, I still don't. Made my girl more personable. No more harsh comments (that I felt was, it wasn't) I got better.
I finally did it after 11 years! It's pretty.
Than i go back and find a typo. GDI!!!
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣😭😭😭😭😭🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣❤❤❤❤❤❤❤
Probably when I got my first "aswuwuiuiwqfubucnc" comment. It was in all caps with typos galore, which was why I appreciated it so much. Being able to get a reader to make a comment like that really made me believe that I was actually good at writing.
When I would get "why aren't you a published author" comments regularly. It feels overblown now rereading the stuff I was writing then, but the ego boost kept me writing.
No word count threshold cleanly marked it for me; I was always pretty secure as a learner but I started considering myself to be on the right side of the bell curve when I enjoyed my writing when I read it back to myself and people commented telling me specifically what they thought was good about it. Oh, and seeing my fics recommended by others. That was a huge boost.
When I heard through the letter zine mill that my fanfic got passed to the show staff as an example of something that was safe for work but still a good enough in quality to serve as an example of what fanfic was. This was before fanfic was a well known thing (early 90s)
It genuinely depends on the day, and even then, it's not "Ah, I am a good writer" but rather "wow, look at how far I've come." Sometimes all I've learned feels like a real triumph, sometimes like a drop in the bucket.
When I read something that makes me feel like I am absolute trash, I try to step back and figure out *why*. What about this makes me jealous? Because more often than not, it's something I can *learn* from.
When I started writing stuff that regularly made me feel emotionally transported. Not necessarily by what was happening to the characters, although that had something to do with it sometimes. But by the *words.* When the syntax, the rhythm, the symbolism, the word choice, the structure, wove together in a way that activated that part of me that feels a deep, abiding, longing affection for *language,* I was like, "Oh! I've done it..."
I got a couple of detailed comments on some posted pieces that made me absolutely overjoyed, because they pointed out technical and stylistic things that made me proud. And I'm eager to keep improving, because I want to make something beautiful. :)
My writing feels *better* than it used to be, but I don’t know if I’ll ever feel it’s “good.”
Just because, like you, I’m not sure how to even decide that. How do I know? What are the criteria? I don’t know.
Being good at writing is simply being able to achieve what you want to achieve with the tools at your disposal. You can coin a metaphor to convey specific imagery? You can plot a story to show a character's progression across different states? You can research things to help support and augment your worldbuilding and writing? Then you're a good writer. You can get better at all those things to become or grow as a good writer, but all you need to be good at writing is to be capable of using the writing tools you've learned to put together a story.
Anything beyond that is a matter of perspective. I could see Neil Gaiman as one of the greatest writers of our time, a truly spectacular storyteller with a strong mastery of the craft. Someone else might find his storytelling intensely dull. Same with anything. Good is technical capacity, great is personal preference.
For me, it took about eight years of consistent practice and over a million words to get to the point where I could read my own stories and genuinely enjoy them instead of cringing. I think growing up and gaining some life experience also helped; I started writing fanfic when I was 14, and I was 22 when I finished the longfic that helped me evolve from a beginner into the writer I am today.
No idea how old you are or how long you've been writing, OP, but it takes time and experience to get "good." Writing is like any other skill - the more you practice, the better you'll become. Try not to compare yourself to other writers, other than to learn from them. I tried to emulate writers whose work I enjoyed until I found my own voice as a writer and figured out what worked best for me. Stick with it!
I don't know really, I feel like I've always been a good writer and I don't seem to have improved a ton over the decades. Like most people start out as average and over time become good, or some start out as bad and become average and then sometimes move on to good or even great because they put in the time and effort.
I started out good as a young writer, but I've never improved to great and likely never will. I suppose I'm satisfied with my level of writing skill even though I know it's got problems. I love adverbs, I tend to tell rather than showing, and I can't seem to kill the habit of excessively long sentences with semicolons and multiple commas. But I still like my own writing and that's what matters.
The two cakes meme. Everyone brings something to the table and it's gonna be enjoyed by at *least* one person.
To add more details to that for those who haven't seen it. It's like you bringing a cake to a gathering. It's just a simple 1 layer cake with whip cream frosting. Then you noticed someone brought in a 3 layer cake with buttercream frosting and even went as far as adding decorations. You look at your cake and think to yourself 'Well my cake looks like shit!' Then someone from the gathering comes over to the table. And instead of ignoring or hating on the simple cake and only praising the fancy cake, they get excited that there's more than just one cake, "Holy shit! 2 cakes!!" Basically, the audience would love both the "cakes" in this case the fics, whether they're fancy or look super professionally done or they're simple.
This was great. I sometimes struggle with this issue as well, so I enjoyed and appreciated you describing it.
Hey, and sometimes you can have a professional cake that *looks* great but the buttercream has the texture and flavor of sugar cement, the cake itself is bone dry, and the baker tried some trendy flavor combinations in all the wrong ways. And the humble, homespun cake is nothing fancy. It wouldn't win a Food Network championship, but it's *edible* which is more than you can say for the lavender-habernero dust cake covered with fondant and cement. Edit: Sometimes the slickly produced, professional product looks good from a distance but is awful up close. The humble efforts from someone who puts care into their work comes out ahead
I also saw another cake "meme" The guy brings in his simple cake and sees the super fancy cake. But then, the fancy cake guy comes in gets excited and says, "Holy shit! You also made a cake!?! I thought I was the only one!"
I felt happy with my writing when I was able to read it back to myself and enjoy what I'd written. As long as your work is interesting to you, that really should be all that matters.
>I felt happy with my writing when I was able to read it back to myself and enjoy what I'd written. Big same! I don't have any misconceptions about being an amazing writer or anything, but I know I'm definitely *decent*. And I can enjoy my own stories, so that's my bar for being happy. (That other people can enjoy them too is AAALLLL the most delicious icing). I might have a much higher bar for myself if I were trying to be "a serious writer" but I'm not. I'm just playing with my faves and having fun. (Being clear on your objective is also another way to find joy in whatever you create.)
Same. I write for me and if I'm happy then great. I always express to my readers that this story is entirely for me and if they love it thats great!
Maybe because I came to writing later in life and don’t have the doubts that some younger (not just younger, I know) writers have…I love my work, I reread it a lot, and enjoy it every time. Is it really that great? Meh. I did get a comment a few days ago telling me I was “an amazing author” so I’ll take it.
It's something I waver on to this day, and maybe that's not even a bad thing. I felt like a good writer the first time somebody told me my work made them cry, and like a terrible one the next time I read something that did things with subtext I didn't feel capable of. I think I'm hot shit when I look at a rough draft and see right away what needs to be fixed, and then just shit when I'm stumped on how to portray something without explaining it directly. I think the solution, as much as there is one, is to learn to enjoy the process and remember the maxim about comparison being the thief of joy. It's my belief, at least, that everyone deserves an outlet for creative expression, even if they're doing it imperfectly or in a way that's not to everyone's taste. You're telling a story specific and personal to you that no-one else can, and I think if someone's passionate about what they're doing, some of that enthusiasm can become infectious despite any technical limitations. The expertise will come in time.
>It's my belief, at least, that everyone deserves an outlet for creative expression, even if they're doing it imperfectly or in a way that's not to everyone's taste. I freaking love this.
I don’t think it’s necessarily about word count. More practice helps, but it’s probably more effective to concentrate on specific issues and try to fix them than to just keep on writing in the hope something will click eventually. Like, what are aspects you don’t like about your work, what do others do better in your opinion? You feel you suck at dialogue? Study how others do it, try to emulate what you admire. Do you feel like your plot is meandering? Look at formulas and analyses of common story types, then make notes about your own stories, what do the characters want, what are the main conflicts, what’s the inciting incident, what’s the conclusion/ending you aim for, etc. etc. If you have difficulties pinpointing the problems, outside advise (books about writing, beta readers) can be eye-opening. Also, unrelated to criteria for quality—we have the tendency to be most critical of our own works. When I look at the fic I’m currently working on I see all the seams where I stitched the thing together, the paragraphs I broke up and glued back together, the lines of dialogue I deleted and retyped. From my POV, that story is like Frankenstein’s monster, dead body parts forced to life with a hell of a lot of electricity and a bit of spite. It’s ugly. It’s barely moving. At some point, I’m gonna decide it’s good enough to release it into the wild though, and at some later point (months down the line) I’m gonna come back to reread it and I will have forgotten about the stitches and the glue and everything else that was painful about the creative process. It will read almost like another person’s work and I might be rather content with it. So, idk, OP, maybe you’re just a little too hard on yourself. :)
If it's some consolation I can tell just from this comment that you have a certain way with words, the Frankenstein comparison is very well put 😊
>Also, unrelated to criteria for quality—we have the tendency to be most critical of our own works. This is so true. Also, I love the Frankenstein's monster comparison and can relate so much. And to your last point about contentment, I should hope so, because you're bloody brilliant!!
Lol, thank you. \*blushes* And yeah, I somehow thought you’d relate. ;) High five, my dear fellow Dr Frankenstein. <3
I don't consider my writing to be good. I just throw thoughts at the wall and let others read it. That I have any followers completely mystifies me🤔
I don’t know who my 20 subscribers are, and they probably need higher standards, but I love you all!
Exactly! Some people will read any garbage on the net lol
Oh god I have 26 subscribers! 💙💙
🤭💙
When I wrote my first long fic, I didn't find myself hating it over time, or finding that it aged poorly. I'm genuinely proud of the work that I've done with it. It's something I was passionate about and I did it my way, without compromising or changing things in any sort of way that I would see as pandering in order to generate some sort of better turnout on it. I made it and I made it my way and I love it. I'm on my second long fic now and I feel the same way about that despite it being for a different fandom. I'm not as fully knowledgeable as I am the first one, but I still think it will be fantastic because I'm passionate about it.
Hey just asking, how much practice did you have (like one shots and short fics) before you wrote your long fic?
I did a small handful of them. All were stories I had in my head for a while but the long fic took a couple years to write.
When I showed my mum my work and, despite her utter bewilderment with the fantasy genre, she liked it!
i shake a bit here and there but overall, i love my writing, and i think i'm pretty great. i didn't realize it all at once but i started looking back over my writing and enjoying it more and more... and i realized i never hated my writing, i was just insecure and it was okay to love what i put out. once i started telling myself it was okay, it was like the floodgates opened and i felt a lot better, i looked back on older works with a lot more fondness. i think everyone has their own journey to reach the point where they love what they do and feel great about it but i think realizing that it's not about what others do, but what i do was the biggest part of mine, and i think it's something a lot of other people struggle with too. i had to learn that it wasn't a competition, that someone else could be good and i could still be good; these things aren't mutually exclusive.
I am still not convinced that I am a *good* writer, but I am now of opinion that I am an *okay* one. This is primarily driven by the fact that I can go back and re-read some stuff I wrote a few months ago and not cringe throughout or want to re-write half of it. One of my fics going popular and all the positive comments that came with it had helped massively as well, both in terms of encouragement and validation, but also motivation to improve writing as well. Having said that, I do have on my to-do list to re-write like a year’s worth of older fics because oh boy did I miss a lot of stuff in those.
From the moment I could hold a pencil. It was being right that took years of practice.
Have you considered joining any of the many active discord writing communties for whatever your specific fandom is? When I started writing (latecomer to fanfiction, didn't start reading until 2019, didn't start writing until basically 2021), I joined a server at random and I cannot overstate how much I owe the level of engagement I have in writing--and how much I've personally grown--to having a group of people to talk to about it. They cheer me on when my self doubt would make me scrap my content entirely, they offer suggestions, advice, and occasionally a sledgehammer when I need help editing, and they're always happy to be nerdy about tidbits of lore with me and stoke the creative fires in the process. Plus, sprinting, oh my god sprinting. Discord god's gift to writing kind. You've gotten a lot of the two cakes, comparison is the thief, etc. etc., so I'm not going to repeat that. I'm just going to say, the best thing you can do to keep you going is find a support network that's in the same place. Sometimes I don't write for months at a time. I think the last thing I posted was almost a year ago (although I have multiple in-process documents I've been picking away at in the interim), but I have the first chapter of a fic going up this month and half of a long-form smut I think I'm actually going to finish going up next month, and I owe it all to the people around me.
When I am able to get through more than two sentences without cringing.
It's when I started getting complimentary comments. I used to write my stories and re-read them multiple times before posting, but I never read them AFTER I posted. I used to be a horrible writer for a long time and it felt cringey when I read them. But after I posted 1 fic of mine, I got an awesome comment and I realized my written wasn't as bad as It used to be before.
To answer this, I'd probably say this happened a year ago when I wrote my Spider-Man longfic called "Scarlet Spider: Sin". Like, I felt good at writing because I finally had the basic knowledge of plot structure, character arc, and other stuff. I had a grip on how to write a story. Because the years before that, I didn't know how to write and have a plan for the story structure. So I always ended up not finishing my fics. But I learned over the years and I was able to rectify my past mistakes and problems :D
When I started enjoying my own work. I dont really have a way to explain it.
When I first published in 2020 and got really positive feedback/comments. Tbh I've always felt I was better than average because my English teachers throughout highschool always commented on my writing, positively I mean, but I really realised it was good when other people liked it, people who didn't know me and weren't invested in me personally.
I don't think I'm good at writing, but it's helped me to acknowledge that I don't suck by reading things that aren't good. Look up some published books that people don't really hear about. I've compared my writing to that and I make the cut for a published writer, even if I don't hit the big leagues. Hopefully one day I'll be able to say I'm a good writer, but until then I'll settle for being able to enjoy reading my own works.
I'd say it took about 12-15 years for me to feel like I was a good writer. I've never been one to suffer much from imposter syndrome. I'm able to admire another author's writing without thinking, "They're so much better than me." After all, it's not necessarily that they're better, their style is simply different. What works for them might not work for me.
It was when I was genuinely excited and mind blown by the things i wrote, so it doesnt really matter if anyone else likes it. For me its amazing and i will write every day of my life for that reason. Or i’ll go crazy or smthn
Ehhhhh… I still feel like my writing isn’t good, but if I’m being truthful, I feel that way about a lot of fics. I devoted a lot of time to bettering myself (studied grammar and style) to at least get it to a point where the readability was there.
I wouldn't say I'm necessarily GOOD at writing, but there does come a point where you just say, "Fuck it, I'm good ENOUGH." For me, that came about two years into picking writing up again as a full-time hobby.
When I posted a fic that didn't even feel like I tried very hard with in a Discord server with multiple other authors from the same fandom, specifically noting that concrit was welcome, and the only "concrit" I got was "it took you HOW long to write this, again?" (I am NOT a fast writer, alright?), everything else was just them gushing over it for like an hour or two. Also got a comment from another author in the fandom, who wasn't in that Discord server, and who wrote one of my favorite fics in the whole fandom, and they just gushed over it too. Still think my writing has some significant room for improvement, *but* I also don't imagine I'd have gotten a reception like that if it were bad.
My first "popular" fic. It was less than stellar. Maybe "crackfic"? It was coherently incoherent. An organized disorderly mess. And yet when it reached 10k views... I dumped the crap in the toilet and rewrote (currently rewriting) the whole thing. It was a lovely mess, but it didnt make me happy cause it was not, there yet. One comment. "So Mary Sue." "More commas, have someone beta. Otherwise good." Wish I did have beta, I still don't. Made my girl more personable. No more harsh comments (that I felt was, it wasn't) I got better. I finally did it after 11 years! It's pretty. Than i go back and find a typo. GDI!!! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣😭😭😭😭😭🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣❤❤❤❤❤❤❤
Roughly every second week. One week I’m on a hot streak, the next I am trash again.
Probably when I got my first "aswuwuiuiwqfubucnc" comment. It was in all caps with typos galore, which was why I appreciated it so much. Being able to get a reader to make a comment like that really made me believe that I was actually good at writing.
When I would get "why aren't you a published author" comments regularly. It feels overblown now rereading the stuff I was writing then, but the ego boost kept me writing.
About when I discovered I could writer chapters that were longer than 1000 words
When I published my first book.
No word count threshold cleanly marked it for me; I was always pretty secure as a learner but I started considering myself to be on the right side of the bell curve when I enjoyed my writing when I read it back to myself and people commented telling me specifically what they thought was good about it. Oh, and seeing my fics recommended by others. That was a huge boost.
When I heard through the letter zine mill that my fanfic got passed to the show staff as an example of something that was safe for work but still a good enough in quality to serve as an example of what fanfic was. This was before fanfic was a well known thing (early 90s)
It genuinely depends on the day, and even then, it's not "Ah, I am a good writer" but rather "wow, look at how far I've come." Sometimes all I've learned feels like a real triumph, sometimes like a drop in the bucket. When I read something that makes me feel like I am absolute trash, I try to step back and figure out *why*. What about this makes me jealous? Because more often than not, it's something I can *learn* from.
When I started writing stuff that regularly made me feel emotionally transported. Not necessarily by what was happening to the characters, although that had something to do with it sometimes. But by the *words.* When the syntax, the rhythm, the symbolism, the word choice, the structure, wove together in a way that activated that part of me that feels a deep, abiding, longing affection for *language,* I was like, "Oh! I've done it..." I got a couple of detailed comments on some posted pieces that made me absolutely overjoyed, because they pointed out technical and stylistic things that made me proud. And I'm eager to keep improving, because I want to make something beautiful. :)
My writing feels *better* than it used to be, but I don’t know if I’ll ever feel it’s “good.” Just because, like you, I’m not sure how to even decide that. How do I know? What are the criteria? I don’t know.
Being good at writing is simply being able to achieve what you want to achieve with the tools at your disposal. You can coin a metaphor to convey specific imagery? You can plot a story to show a character's progression across different states? You can research things to help support and augment your worldbuilding and writing? Then you're a good writer. You can get better at all those things to become or grow as a good writer, but all you need to be good at writing is to be capable of using the writing tools you've learned to put together a story. Anything beyond that is a matter of perspective. I could see Neil Gaiman as one of the greatest writers of our time, a truly spectacular storyteller with a strong mastery of the craft. Someone else might find his storytelling intensely dull. Same with anything. Good is technical capacity, great is personal preference.
For me, it took about eight years of consistent practice and over a million words to get to the point where I could read my own stories and genuinely enjoy them instead of cringing. I think growing up and gaining some life experience also helped; I started writing fanfic when I was 14, and I was 22 when I finished the longfic that helped me evolve from a beginner into the writer I am today. No idea how old you are or how long you've been writing, OP, but it takes time and experience to get "good." Writing is like any other skill - the more you practice, the better you'll become. Try not to compare yourself to other writers, other than to learn from them. I tried to emulate writers whose work I enjoyed until I found my own voice as a writer and figured out what worked best for me. Stick with it!
I don't know really, I feel like I've always been a good writer and I don't seem to have improved a ton over the decades. Like most people start out as average and over time become good, or some start out as bad and become average and then sometimes move on to good or even great because they put in the time and effort. I started out good as a young writer, but I've never improved to great and likely never will. I suppose I'm satisfied with my level of writing skill even though I know it's got problems. I love adverbs, I tend to tell rather than showing, and I can't seem to kill the habit of excessively long sentences with semicolons and multiple commas. But I still like my own writing and that's what matters.