I hate the fact that I find a new error every time I go through something I've written. The most annoying part is that it doesn't seem to matter how many times I look at it. Or even, how many times I have other people look at it. There's always another mistake, or another line that needs to be rewritten, or another sentence that should be added/deleted for clarity's sake.
This highlights my desire to make my writing perfect. Of course, this is probably impossible. Sure, it can be devoid of typos and filled with competently-worded sentences, but will something ever be perfect? Is Ender's Game perfect? In some respects, yes; for all practical purposes, it may as well be; technically, no it's not.
It's incredibly difficult to separate the idea that a technically perfect piece of writing is somehow linked to my skill as a writer. Perhaps it isn't; nevertheless, I get immediately crabby about a piece of writing that I'm editing if there are mistakes all over the place. It could be a good story, but these mistakes get in the way. They subtract from my estimation of the submission, in much the same way a typo in a resume might kill the applicant's chance at getting an interview. Unless, of course, the applicant's credentials are too incredible to ignore.
Ultimately I guess it comes down to striking a balance; are there few enough mistakes in your good-enough story?
I think it's pretty difficult to separate what matters from what doesn't. This is probably true in life in general, but is especially true when we discuss what makes good writing. One problem is that there are so many examples of what we might term "good writing," and what works in one piece might not work in another. Writing skill and story, yin and yang, two parts of a whole. There is always a balance. Plus, most people use the term "good writing" to describe a range of things they like about a particular piece.
At the end of the day, I think I simply need to stop caring about whether or not I'm a "good writer." This was something that Orson Scott Card probably wanted everyone to walk away from his writing group having internalized. It's harder than it sounds, not just because my personality is like that, but because when one is looking for success at anything, not just as a hobbyist, but truly looking to become accomplished, well, it's good to be good at that thing, right?
Seems obvious, when phrased so generally, but I think this falls apart when applied to fiction writing (or perhaps when applied to any art form.) Or rather, I think it's easy to focus on the things that don't matter. Changing "a" to "the," or adding just one more sentence; these things won't make a piece of writing. The useful technical advice that fills Elements of Style make good guidelines, but that book should be termed Elements of Grammatically Correct and Essentially Clear Writing. It most certainly should not include the word "Style." I think it's style that defines a fiction writer, and style is something that can be very hard to define. It's comprised of many things: word choice, word order, rythm, flow, content, form, etc. Can you teach these things? Each thing on its own, to some extent, possibly yes. Can you teach how all of these things fit together to either make or break a story, or a writer?
No.
