The Art of Getting Better at What You’re Doing

Try and fail and edit: an essay about writing essays.

I’ve been writing nonfiction essays; so far, they’re stories about my life. When I’m finished with the one I’m working on now, I’ll send it in to various journals and contests I’ve found on the internet. I’m trying to pay for graduate school, and thus using my most useful additional asset—the ability and interest to write—to write and submit essays to cash prize contests and scholarships.

Since I’ve started doing this, writing essays about things I’ve deemed interesting, my brain has come alive in a subtly new way: everything that happens becomes a potential story. Details I’ve forgotten about my life have come trickling back at odd moments, clamoring for a spot in a paragraph. In the same way I imagine photographers notice everywhere they go what they could photograph, or how painters notice what they could paint, I’ve become attuned to the possibility of what I could write about. Every moment, past and present, is a potential opportunity to capture through story.

I’m studying the art of actually writing essays by reading online journal archives and books of beautifully written ones. I have not ever taken a class explicitly on essay writing, unless you count high school instructions for constructing a classy “5-Paragraph Essay.” I was close to receiving a minor in Professional Writing in college, but the timing of the pandemic rendered my ability to add the class I needed impossible. Of the classes I did take in that discipline, I remember little, except that the internship I landed was for my University’s “Instructional Technology Blog.” There, I wrote a handful of blog posts, including one that makes my eyes roll out of my head just thinking about it now: “Silver Linings in Remote Learning.” Alas, no Professional Writing minor degree for me. I guess I don’t need one.

Starting to write publicly a few years ago was born out of a desire to become a better writer. As that most esteemed advice goes, writers write. And so write I have, badly and well and all the notches in between badly to well. I often don’t know where I’m going until I start writing, having followed an idea or a lick of inspiration. I write to find out what I think or already know, and to see where it ends up; other writers, I know, have the ending or goal in mind from the beginning. Having a deadline—this deadline, which happened earlier today—has been instrumental to developing my ability to edit for clarity and let go of perfect. I write and I edit, and then with only a little thought as to who may be reading—self-consciousness doesn’t do many favors—I send it off, to the land of Substack or, recently, a journal submission inbox. It is only in retrospect that I can decide if something I wrote was strong or lackluster; even then, it is mostly the process that matters in making me a better writer. 

I don’t intend writing to be my full-time job; not because I don’t think that there wouldn’t be endless inspiration to keep me occupied. Thus, there is an element of luxury to the freedom I have to write: I’m not paying my bills by writing for fashion magazines or as a ghost, although doing so would undoubtedly make me more skilled. But there is passion and interest for me in writing just as there is passion and interest in pursuing a master’s degree in Early Childhood Mental Health: I do not want to be confined to one career path. There are so many things I want to do, and I will see to as many of them as I can. If I have any intentions for where writing will take me, it is simply for writing to be a constant in my life and to eventually write a book or two. And, as of right now, for it to help me pay for graduate school via entering and theoretically winning essay contests. (I truly, naively, have no idea who enters such contests.) Above all, I want to get better at the craft, and remain dedicated to that pursuit. That brings me great satisfaction on its own. 

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Given all of the above, I have been made vulnerable to idolizing writers and public intellectuals and placing them upon pedestals without their consent. I want to learn from people who are smarter and better at writing than I am. Upon locating such people, I have a tendency to become swept up in their work and raise them up to be some sort of prophet, even while knowing I shouldn’t.

It is so tempting to feel the need to rank ourselves among the people for whom we hold admiration. It is so tempting to believe that someone else has the answers we need or want so desperately. If only we just had their secret, their beauty, their talent, their ability to construct a good story…

But the people we look up to are flawed humans, too. While they may have more knowledge or experience or whatever than we do, they will almost certainly fail or disappoint us someday. We can learn from them without getting lost in the weeds of comparison and pedestalization.

In only the last year, I have been better at balancing my admiration with self-respect and maturity. I do not want to be or even be like Ann Patchett, or Elizabeth Gilbert, or Cheryl Strayed or Kathryn Schulz or Joan Didion or Sylvia Plath, though I look up to these writers as any baseball-playing child looks up to their favorite All-Star. I do want to set my writing standards up higher, closer to their level of expertise. I don’t want to write their stories, or write in their voices, or subscribe to their views on life or the world. But I do want to study the structure of their essays and memoirs and stories, and marvel at the complexity and simplicity of their work—and I am doing just that. I am learning. I am learning how to construct a good essay and tell a good story, and I will say that only a little of it is intuitive. Much more of it is the willingness to try and fail and edit. 

I listened in April to Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild, and read her book of essays Tiny Beautiful Things. I also binged five of Ann Patchett’s books: her nonfiction books Truth and Beauty, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, and These Precious Days, and two of her novels. How has it taken me so long to dig into Ann Patchett? I must admit, it was because I was being judgmental: I thought that someone who had written so many books must be cheapening them in some way. As it turns out, she is a brilliant writer who has devoted her life and livelihood to writing. Her work is rich, very good, and very worthy of close examination.

The more marinating I do in the work of good writers like Ann Patchett, Cheryl Strayed, and Sylvia Plath, the more I understand that they are good because they worked at it. The excitement or emotional pull of a story only sometimes makes a good piece of writing. More reliably often, a writer writes a good piece because they have spent a lot of time trying and failing and editing their work, and then doing that again.

I also do my share of marinating in the soup of mediocre or decidedly not good writers. I’ll show more judgment here and comment on the multitude of poorly written celebrity memoirs that sell out because of the fame of its writer or the ludicrousness of the story they tell. I can learn something from mediocre or ‘not good’ books as well, and so I do read them (sometimes). I change the grammar in my head and consider why they chose to introduce some past experience in a certain place. If I say it was poorly written, I’ve got to be able to say why I think so.

Clearly, I don’t want to be a mediocre or bad writer. I also don’t want to rely on the ludicrousness or emotional pull of my essays to make them appealing: I want to be really good at the actual stringing together of sentences. I want to choose exactly the words that tell the right story and achieve the most clarity possible. While I love to hear that people relate to my writing—and I am so grateful to those of you who do—I love more to hear, and to feel, that what I wrote was well-written. I’m willing to work harder for the latter than I am the former. Relatability is a nice by-product, but not the point of why I write.

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What makes a good essay, memoir, novel, short story? Going to work on it. Sometimes, sure, it’s the strength of its emotional pull or the fame of the writer. But as I’ll say again, much of what makes a good piece of writing is the willingness of the writer to try and fail and edit. For every good piece of writing, chances are high that a lot of trying, failing, and editing came before it.

Isn’t so much of nearly everything about trying and failing and editing? I think it must be: there are countless colloquialisms that say as such. If you want to be good at something, you’ve got to actually do it. You’ve got to mess it up, clean it up, and then do it again.

What I’ve learned of becoming a better writer, in the years since I’ve more doggedly dedicated myself to this pursuit, is this: keep writing. Try again. Be a little more daring than you think you can be; not irresponsibly so, but enough to keep you moving in the direction of growth and improvement. Challenge yourself to try harder or differently. Keep writing.

I think most writers worth their salt would agree, and have something more profound to say.

Being a good writer is not easy and immediate; nor is most of what creates meaning in our lives. The most rewarding things we create, build, or nurture—our art, relationships, projects, children—require a long haul of effort, consistency, dedication, perseverance. There is a place for cheap, easy, and quick, but the successes and proud moments of our lives are not likely to come that way. 

Try, fail, edit. Repeat. This is how we continue rising to our unique potential.

Maggie