Judging Your Work

From an interview with Flannery O'Connor

Q. By what standards do you judge your own work? Is objectivity difficult? Are you ever fully satisfied with a finished work?

A. I suppose the standards are largely instinctive. I have a sort of feeling for what I'm doing, else I wouldn't be doing it. I don't suppose objectivity is difficult. I wouldn't be attached to a sorry story just because I had written it. Sometimes you need time between you and the story before you can really see it whole; usually it's good to see how somebody else reads it. Distance is always a help. Sometimes I'm fully satisfied with something I've written but most of the time I'm just satisfied that this is the best I can do with my limitations.

from Conversations with Flannery O'Connor edited by Rosemary M. Magee. Excerpt from an Interview with C. Ross Mullins, Jr. published in Jubilee, June 1963