One of the most difficult things about being a writer is figuring out whether you’re getting better at it or not. While there are moments where your own progress is clear and obvious, more often you’re totally not sure if something you wrote today is better than something you wrote five years ago.
Sometimes I’ll sell a story that I wrote a very long time ago (I have a tendency to continue submitting stories well past the point where a sane person might think the story’s simply not that great) and re-read it and think, gosh, that is a pretty good story. I’ll see all sorts of things I’d forgotten I’d done in it, and it will seem to me that my more recent work is simply not as complex or as interesting.
Getting better as a writer is tough to gauge because it’s all so subjective, of course, but you can detect progress by measuring your writing marginal gains.
It’s the Little Things
The theory of marginal gains has its roots in cycling; the idea is that small improvements in a process can ripple out to measurable improvements in an already-efficient system. For cyclists, the idea was that improving one aspect of their training or equipment could result in a 1% or 2% increase in their overall speed on the course. Those gains are marginal—but in a competitive scenario they can be decisive.
You can do the same thing, mostly, in your writing. You might not ever find a web site that will analyze your novel or story and give you a hard number on its quality, but you can work on the individual components of your writing and get feedback from people. Write a dialog exchange, or a description. Write out a plot synopsis, or an internal monologue, or a stream-of-consciousness section. Something short and discrete that you can show to folks and get simple feedback on. Chances are if you start to get better and better feedback on, say your dialog, the stories you’re writing will be improving too.
The improvement might be marginal. But it all contributes to the whole.
Marginal gains can be invisible, of course. If you write a story today that is 1% better in some sense than a story you wrote last month, the difference might not be immediately obvious. But it’s there, and those 1% improvement add up like fractional pennies from the Office Space scheme.