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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26360
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26360
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

How can you tell whether "yes, this is good" or "okay, this needs work"?

These are objective artistic judgments. Emotional distance from the work is certainly part of what you need to make them about your own work, but you also need artistic detachment. What I see very consistently is that the better a writer is, the better the stuff they are reading. Some of the best writing teachers stress this as well. (See, for instance, _Reading like a Writer_ by Francine Prose.

If you feel your judgement is impaired by your closeness to the work, get some emotional and artistic distance but putting it away and setting yourself a course of reading. Read the stuff you love, but not stuff similar to what you are writing. Read the classics. Read for several genre's. Read as intensively as your schedule with allow. Give yourself time to find your love of literature in the books you are reading. This is the basis of your emotional connection to your own work, so this re-grounds you emotionally in the wider world of books that you love. And exposing yourself to the work of a diverse set of good writers clears your pallet, artistically, and give you an objective standard of art against which to judge your own work.

After immersing yourself in five or six good books, or more, to the point where you feel refreshed and rededicated to your art, pull your book out of the drawer. It probably isn't going to stand very well in comparison to the books you have been reading, and the differences will be obvious to you. But do this enough time and you may get to the point where you pull it out and find it still stands up. That is when it is ready to submit.

While the approach of writing something else to give you a time gap on your first work doubtless give you some emotional distance, it does not give you an better artistic perspective. When it comes out of the drawer, you will still be comparing you to you, and that is not really the kind of artistic or emotional detachment that you need and will get from a concerted program of reading.

Original score: 4