Letters to the Editor
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Rilke's Answer
The letter writer should read Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet." In it, Rilke answers, with beauty and wisdom, a very similar question posed to him over a hundred years ago. Here is an excerpt:
You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you - no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must," then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your while life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse.
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Fuck the Rules!
You will never know if you are truly good by other people's standards. Not really. You will always question it. I have been in graduate workshops. Much of the writing is awful. The experience is hostile and competitive. It is what it is.
Sounds to me that you are still an undergraduate. My advice is to do well in school and write as much as you can. Then go out and live awhile. Work in the real world. If you can get a writing job, perhaps on a newpaper, good. You are on the right track with your reading but what you read is important and how you read is important. Read the best. Don't just read the best but analyse it. Why is it good? Look at it sentence by sentence. Here is an excerpt from Cormac McCarthy's The Road:
When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.
I was rereading today. I said, "Jesus Christ ... goddamned ... how in the hell does he do that?"
Okay, so that wasn't a very literary response, but I was in awe. Then I began to analyse it. A basic workshop truism is never begin a story with a dream. Tell that to Hemingway! Most beginning writers strive for variety in description. Most workshop critics would say to avoid repeating yourself. McCarthy turns repetition into prayer. Note how often in that short paragraph he uses the word cold and the word dark and the word light. Plenty. Now look at the imagery of stone that he employs with words like flowstone, granitic, stone room, rimstone, rock, alabaster.
Fuck the rules and the lame advice. You either find your own voice or you find nothing. That doesn't mean that you cannot learn from studying the voice of other writers, especially masters like McCarthy. So try out what he did. Can you use repetition to make poetry of prose? Don't just plug in words; make what you are writing yours. Read it aloud.
If you don't read poetry, you should. Start now and read two poems, "Fern Hill" by Dylan Thomas, (note the repetition!) and "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats. Maybe you will notice something in Yeat's "rough beast" with a "blank gaze." Good writers steal. No, they don't plagiarize. They take an image or technique and make it their own. Poetry will repay you in better prose.
You might be interested to know that McCarthy's title for No Country for Old Men comes from Yeat's poem "Sailing to Byzantium."
When you have five complete short stories or ten complete chapters of a novel, revised several times, only then should you enter a graduate writing program. By then, you will have made enough mistakes. Also, you will have a better idea of what advice to take and when to take it and when your professors and your workshop members are spouting stuff that, while it might be useful to others, is not quite right for you.
When I was an undergraduate, I was privileged to take a graduate workshop. In one class a workshop member wrote a story satirizing the workshop process. All those very talkative peers of his were outraged as was the teacher. He dropped out. Five years later, he came back and finished his degree. By that time, he had a critically praised novel under his belt. Succeeding is not everything. Succeeding on your own terms is. You get to decide when you are good enough.