What if My Writing Sucks?

“You don’t like Gordon Lightfoot?” I asked him.

“Not since he came out with the album ‘Get Ready, I Suck.’”

This was taken from an actual exchange from a few years ago, shared with you now to make the point that tastes can be highly subjective. However, as writers, I believe we have legitimate reason to question the quality of our own work. For the most part, ours is one of the few artforms that almost necessitates coming to fruition in isolation.

So, as we spend weeks, months or years birthing our masterpiece, it is a fair question to wonder if anyone outside the echo chamber of our own mind would see the merit in what we’ve created.

It’s a reasonable question, but not always an altogether fair one.

First, tastes are subjective. And trends are subject to changes in style and influence that can make or break a book’s success. Consider how popular A Handmaid’s Tale became after the trump election, or The Plot Against America, for that matter. Neither contemporary, but both found a resurgence of interest long after they were written. Your YA supernatural romance book about werewolves who ride motorcycles across country in an effort to raise money to cure a rare disease may get shuffled to the slush pile until said rare disease shows up in the headlines for some reason and becomes pertinent in the…