The Case of the Missing Measuring Stick

by Cassondra Murray


I’m going to out myself here.

If I can’t run with the big dogs, I tend to stay on the porch. I don't expect this of anyone else. Only of myself.

It’s a character flaw.

I don’t know where I got this trait. I don’t mind a learning curve, even a sharp one. I don’t even mind a painful one at times. But I don’t like being bad at stuff.


Several years ago I went to Nashville to pursue the music business. I was already too old for a record deal and I knew that. So I went to study songwriting.

I was not content to write songs and play around my small town. I wanted to compete with the best in the business, or not at all.

There’s an out-of-print book about Trisha Yearwood’s climb through the music industry to stardom. It’s required reading for folks who want to know how the recording industry works. I took the title as my mantra—Get Hot or Go Home.

I devoured songwriting text books. I took workshops, attended classes. I networked. I spent every night until 1 a.m. in Nashville’s songwriter clubs and in living room pickin parties listening to the best in the business work their magic.

If you’ve never heard a professional songwriter in a small club playing his/her own songs, you’ve missed something deep and poignant. It’s one of the most magical, powerful encounters with pure creative energy you’ll experience in your lifetime.
The first week I went to Nashville I was at the Bluebird café for a writer’s night. A room full of Nashville’s best commercial songwriters listening to others like them perform their latest work. Steve Winwood was there I think. So was Michael McDonald.

Do you know who Alex Harvey is? Probably not, unless you’re a student of commercial songwriting.

A long time ago he wrote a song titled Delta Dawn—and that song launched the mega-career of a young woman named Tanya Tucker. He’s been cranking out hits ever since, though he probably could have retired on the money from that song alone because it was such a huge success. I was in the back corner of the Bluebird waiting in line for the bathroom my third day in Nashville and Alex Harvey was in line too. He was the special songwriter guest that night, and he would go on stage later to perform his songs. That's an old picture of Alex down there on the left.

He looked at me, pushed his lips out a little and said, “You new in town?”

“Yeah,” I said.“Just got here this week.”

“So, you writin’ any good songs?”

I shrugged. “I think so,” I said. “But how do you tell?”

He nodded.

“That’s the hardest part when you first get to town,” he said. “You don’t know if the last song you wrote is any good or not.”

More profound words have never been spoken. He was saying, in a way specific to songwriting, that I didn’t have any kind of stick with which to measure my work.

And he was right. It’s true not just of songwriting, but of almost everything in the world of art isn’t it? It’s true of the books we write when we're new fiction writers, and even not-so-new fiction writers.

How do you know?

How do you know if the last painting you did, or the last book you wrote, or the last poem or song you wrote is any good? How do you know if your guitar riffs breathe, if your unique musical or vocal style has merit, if your latest musical composition is worth listening to? How do you learn to please yourself with your work?

Now, some people seem to have an inner sense—some mechanism that lets them know that this—THIS—is it. THIS IS GOOD.

Not me.

I realized as I considered his words, that I had never had a measuring stick of my own. I might have been born with one, but something had happened to it a long time ago. Maybe it was a bad teacher. Or a hyper critical sibling. Whatever it was, it happened so long ago that I’d forgotten about it.

For my entire life, the stick by which I measured my work had been other people’s opinions.

Alex Harvey told me that I should keep writing, that I would get there. And I did that. I got pretty good at it actually. Not amazing, but I could sit down to co-write with any pro in the business and hold my own. I had an inherent talent for it. And I’d learned a lot. I’d built skill and I understood what it took to run with those big dogs.

But you want to know the truth? Even after all of that, the elusive measuring stick was not there. I had the raw materials, but the actual stick did not exist as yet.

You want to do something hard? Get up in a songwriter town and play your stuff in a little bitty room for a bunch of other songwriters, some who just stepped off the bus and others who have a string of hits under their belts.

And that’s the trouble. In my mind, they held the stick. They were the ones who would say whether my work had merit. There’s some truth to that I guess. Who among us does not wish to be respected by peers?

As fiction writers and RWA members, we get the benefit of writing contests, critique, and the learning that goes with that. Some of it good, some of it not so good at times. Even with those opportunities, without the inner measuring stick, how do you know which advice to believe and which to take with the proverbial grain of salt?

I took a lot of art classes when I was a girl and recently, after many years of not lifting a paintbrush, I started taking watercolor classes. Even in high school I could paint hyper-realism. Photo-style portraits in oil and acrylic.

But watercolor is a different animal.

You have to plan ahead, then you have to let it flow—you have to be loose and free and allow the painting to help you decide what it’s going to be. It’s the most difficult media I’ve worked with, ever. My perfectionism and my need to get good FAST meet their match in watercolor.

Last year my instructor asked me to hang something in a teacher-student show at a local gallery.

No way.

“You’ve got some great stuff” she said.

But to my mind it wasn’t great. Everything I’d done had been a copy of another painting, or a study in class based on something the teacher had done. Guided exercise. Nothing I felt was worthy of even framing, let alone hanging for people to look at.

I told Jeanne about it and said, “What is wrong with me? Am I so afraid of critique that I can’t hang a painting in a student show?”

Jeanne said, “Who criticizes student art?”

She was right.

I know now, what it was. It was the measuring stick. I was afraid because I was still unsure of the measuring stick for visual arts. I still don't have a solid measuring stick for painting. As it’s a hobby for me I don’t have a huge problem with that. And that's how you get good at anything. You copy those you respect and admire. You learn their techniques. You follow the recipe and the rules until one day, it becomes ingrained in you and POW, you can make up your own dishes. YOU are the chef. You are the artist and your unique voice comes through.

Or at least, that's how I imagine it to be. I imagine that you then begin to rise to the top with the cream.

And something has happened recently as I’ve been working on a new manuscript—one that’s a dramatic departure from the stuff I usually write. I’ve found myself wanting to write for ME. Not for anybody else.

This past week, I worked on a painting in class that was not something the teacher assigned. It was from a photo I took. A subject I liked. Watercolors of old buildings may be an overdone subject--maybe even cliched.

But you know what? I don’t care. Because I like it.

It’s still student art. I see all kinds of things wrong with it, and it isn’t quite done. I still have to put some shadows here, some weeds there, finish some trees. But I have it sitting in my kitchen, and I look at it, and I like it.

In fact I like it enough that I’m going to show it to you.

I call it The House on Mennonite Church Road.

Something has happened and my measuring stick for where I belong in the visual arts is materializing. This painting is not nearly as loose and impressionistic as I'd like to be, but neither is it the fussy hyper-realistic painter that I was.

I had to be away from Nashville for nearly three years before my songwriting measuring stick appeared.

At about that three year mark I got out my guitar and was playing through some of my songs—ones I was working on when life took me another direction and I stepped away from the music biz for a time. All of a sudden I listened to my own work and I sat there and stared for a minute.

Well, dang. I knew.

I KNEW. That one is mediocre. But this one…this one is actually damn good.

And I really don’t care whether anybody else likes it or not. It just doesn't matter because it's an expression of me and who I am. Like all art should be. But you know what? When I play it for people, they cry. That tells me that maybe, just maybe, my inner measuring stick is not too far off.

It's been the same with fiction manuscripts. Because I’m a writer by training I’m not shy about saying that good writing should move people. I believe that. Nevertheless, the measuring stick in my soul has been...well...ephemeral at best.

But something has changed there too. After years of writing to please teachers, copy and news editors, and publishers, I’ve begun to write for me. Yes, I want to sell. I want the recognition from outside that I’ve accomplished a goal. I want to get paid for it and I'll do what it takes to hone the craft to that point.

But even if I never sell, I will like what I’m writing. And I will write the stories because they want to be written. I'll work my rear off for an editor who wants me to make changes, since they know a lot more about marketable books than I do. But I won't be writing because I want someone else’s approval. I’ve built the skill and I will continue to build it for the rest of my life I hope. But I’m writing for me now.

The measuring stick is inside me.

So what about you, Sisters and friends?

Do you have your own inner measuring stick? How do you think we get those “measuring sticks” and how do we lose them?

Have you ever lost yours? Ever lost your sense of who you "are" as a writer, an engineer, an artist, a mom, a wife, a person?

Most of us know self doubt--how do you find your inner measuring stick once you've lost it?

How do you know good work when you see it?

Is there a painting, or a song, or a play or a piece of music that moves you to tears or laughter or angst or joy, and to which you compare everything else?

What is it about the books on your shelves—the “auto-buy” writers whose books you know you’re going to love—that measures up to what you want as a reader?