How Do You Know if Your Writing Is Good?
Quick answer: How do you know if your writing is good? The honest signals: cold rereads, reader behaviour, personal rejections, and tests that beat guesswork.
You know your writing is good when it works on readers who have no reason to be kind: they finish it without being asked, they mention specific moments days later, and they react to what you were actually attempting. Private signals count too. If a scene still holds tension when you reread it cold after six weeks, and if editors have started rejecting you with personal notes instead of form letters, your writing is good and getting better.
The question matters because self-assessment is the one skill the act of writing never teaches on its own. Plenty of writers quit at exactly the moment their work turns publishable, because nothing in the room told them so. Learning to read the real signals, and to ignore the fake ones, is how you keep going long enough to find out what you can do.
Why You Cannot Judge Your Own Pages
When you read your own story, you are not reading the words on the page. You are reading your memory of what you meant. The backstory you cut still plays in your head, the emotion you felt while drafting still colours the scene, and so the page seems fuller than it is. Psychologists call this the curse of knowledge, and no writer is immune to it, including the famous ones.
There is a second problem, described memorably by the broadcaster Ira Glass: for years, your taste runs ahead of your skill. You can tell your story is not as good as the ones you love, but you cannot tell whether it is close or miles away, because the same taste gap distorts both readings. The cure is not confidence. The cure is distance, outside readers, and evidence gathered over time.
Signals That Actually Mean Something
Some feedback is noise and some is gold, and the difference is usually whether the reader owed you anything. Watch for these behaviours rather than compliments:
How to Test a Story Properly
First, use the drawer. Finish the draft, put it away for four to six weeks, then read it in one sitting as if a rival wrote it. The weak scenes will announce themselves. Second, read it aloud; your ear catches padding, repeated rhythms and dead dialogue that your eye forgives. Third, give it to two or three readers and ask targeted questions: where were you bored, what do you remember, what confused you. Never ask whether they liked it.
Finally, test it against strangers with standards. Submitting to magazines gives you a slow, binary signal. A contest with a published rubric gives you a faster and more detailed one; Writory's monthly Short Story Contest, for instance, returns a five-part score out of 100 to every entrant, which turns the vague question of whether you are any good into numbers you can track from month to month.
Mistakes Writers Make When Measuring Themselves
The classic error is polling people who love you. Family praise measures affection, not prose. The second error is mistaking polish for quality: a clean, grammatical story with nothing at stake is still a rejection, while a slightly rough story with a live pulse gets personal notes. Fix the story before the sentences.
Writers also compare their first drafts to other people's published books, forgetting that the published book survived a dozen revisions and a professional edit. And many treat a single rejection as a verdict when editors themselves disagree constantly; the same story is often declined by ten magazines and then wins somewhere else. Judge yourself on a year of evidence, not on one Tuesday's email.
What poets can take from this
- Let every draft cool for at least a month before you decide what it is worth.
- Ask readers where they got bored, never whether they liked it.
- Track personal rejections separately from form rejections; the ratio is your real progress bar.
- Read your work aloud once per revision; your ear is a better editor than your eye.
- Keep one story you wrote two years ago and reread it annually to see how far your eye has come.
- Collect at least a year of submissions and reactions before drawing conclusions about your ability.
Try it yourself
Take a story you finished at least six months ago and read it as a hostile magazine editor with fifty submissions left in the queue. Mark the exact sentence where you would stop reading, then rewrite the story from that sentence onward.
Questions
Is it normal to think your own writing is bad?
Completely. Doubt tracks with a developing eye: as your taste improves, your older work looks worse, which feels like decline but is actually growth. The writers in real trouble are usually the ones with no doubts at all.
Can you be a good writer and not know it?
Yes, and it is common. Because self-assessment lags skill, many writers quit right at the point where editors would have started saying yes. External evidence, such as submissions, scores and reader behaviour, exists precisely to correct that blind spot.
How many readers should see a story before you submit it?
Two or three thoughtful readers are plenty; beyond that, notes start contradicting and the story blurs toward committee taste. Choose people who read the kind of thing you write, and weigh patterns in their reactions over any single opinion. One reader who finishes and asks questions outranks five who say nice.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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