Friday, March 21, 2025

This is the fifth installment of West Wind, your daily drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season.

Writing is an art, and as such, it isn’t subject to the same requirements as science. I’m talking about fiction or non-technical writing, of course, because technical writing is arguably a science where precision and correctness are important. But if you’re writing basically anything else, it can just be what it is, without it having to be “good enough.” Perhaps I’m belaboring the points I made in earlier posts, but I judge it to be important enough to reiterate. Authors agonize over “getting it right” in order to either sell books, appeal to a large amount of people, or something else. But just showing up is good enough. Just doing it in the first place is getting it right, because without anything at all, it can never be right or enough.

I don’t see other artists getting this sort of treatment, either. Painters aren’t told that their paintings need constructive edits in order to sell more paintings. Heck, they can just splash color on a canvas and call it art. So why can’t we? Why can’t the writing be enough of an expression on it’s own, without getting so worked up over it?

If you’re a writer, have you struggled with acceptance or understanding of your work?

If you’re another kind of artist, have you done the same?

Thanks for reading, more on Monday. (This newsletter is only week-daily, spend your Saturday doing something away from a screen and I definitely don’t want to take up your attention on a Sunday)