If you write for a living? Yes. I’m a journalist. I’ve never had a mentor that didn’t struggle with the self-perceived quality of their writing.
The best piece of advice I received about improving my craft was actually during my short stint in art school. One of my professors quoted Walt Stanchfield, who worked for Disney and mentored a lot of their animators throughout the 70s:
We all have 10,000 bad drawings in us. The sooner we get them out the better.
No one is awesome at anything when they’re starting off but the only way to get better is to do it, and I promise you that you will get better.
And it’s actually a great thing you hate your writing because it means you aren’t delusional about it. You can determine what’s bad writing and what’s good writing, which leads to the second best piece of advice I received from a mentor. You have good taste:
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
That’s from Ira Glass.
So you’re on a good path. You just have to remember that (1) you suck right now but you will get better and (2) you can recognize good writing from bad writing, which is largely something you’re just kind of born with.
The third thing is that I’ve also never met a great writer that has felt like they’ve wrote a “perfect” piece. You can spend your whole life rewriting and reediting a single story because you’ll always be getting better and your taste will also evolve so you can spot flaws in your piece that you didn’t before, but doing that is a death trap. It’s chasing the horizon. You’ll never reach it. At some point you need to decide that what you wrote is good enough, enshrine is as an example of “this is who I was at the time”, and then move on to the next project.
