How Do We Know When We’re Doing Our Best Work?

My NEXT BOOK draft currently stands at 14,526 words, and I wouldn’t consider any of those words my “best work.”

Not even the 310 words I shared with you last Friday.

It’s some of my most interesting work, and I think the plot is by far my best plot, and the questions it addresses are particularly immediate and relevant to the group of people whom I envision as its ideal readers*, but it’s not my best writing.

Yet.

Which means it’s time to bring up the question that I promised I’d explore at some point: how do we know when we’re doing our best work?

I know that NEXT BOOK is not yet my best work because it doesn’t yet communicate what I want it to communicate to an audience.

That is: I know that NEXT BOOK is never going to be the story I felt inside my head, all at once, when I climbed the stairs of the Brucemore Mansion. That was kind of like… well, I’d been digging at this potential novel about Mars that wasn’t going anywhere, and my mom and I went to tour Brucemore over Christmas because they had all the decorations up, and I saw a staircase that reminded me of the staircase in this mansion that I dream about on the reg, a big old house with a bunch of secret doors and secret rooms, and I was all I want to write about a big old house…