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What Separates A Good Writer From An Excellent One?
Determine what category of writer you are, and which category you want to be in.
Wherever you are in your writing career, self-reflection and the ability to change course is always a useful vehicle for improvement. I ran across some notes I’d written to myself a few years, lifted and repurposed from an ACT therapist’s manual about the different categorizations of therapists. The manual asked the reader to imagine that choosing which category they wanted to be in (Good, Very Good, or Excellent) was as easy as selecting items off a menu.
I used the same idea to create different categories of writers and to help me determine how I could get where I wanted to be.
I’d like to note that the categories below are only my opinion, and of course, there are exceptions — like excellent writers who can’t take criticism, or bad writers who are actually quite intelligent. And everyone, whether a bad writer or an excellent one, is in different places in their career. Some excellent writers, for example, may never have been published yet. And many were poor, had terrible relationships, and suffered because of their writing. These are just the common traits that I’ve witnessed, and also the traits that I believe would define each category.
