Where is Your Writing At?

 On this blog I followed through the A to Z Challenge, there was a post about the levels of quality in painting miniatures.  In an indie comic, one character created three levels of quality for miniatures:

1. Slop n Go:  Which sounds pretty basic, no frills, maybe even some mistakes
2. Tabletop:  Fancier with like some shading or light effects or something
3. Museum:  Absolute perfection!

At least that's my take on it.

And I thought you could probably do the same with writing too.  Slop n Go is what a lot of us do, especially at first.  We just throw something basic together that probably isn't very good.  It might have cliché plots, clunky dialogue, and/or things like head-hopping or grammatical problems or poor formatting.  I'm sure the interns who have to read "slush piles" see tons of this stuff. 

If you're lucky, you'll graduate to the tabletop level, where your writing is more suitable for a mass audience.  You know, where your plots are a little less cliché and dialogue not so clunky, and almost free of grammatical problems and poor formatting.  Most of your professional writers are at least at this level--or should be.  Some might regress to more of a slop n go approach so they can churn out a bunch of books per year.

Then you have those few who ascend to the museum level.  Those are the Pulitzer or Booker Prize or whatever type winners.  The real standouts who will probably be taught one day in literature classes--or already are like Shakespeare, Huck Finn, To Kill A Mockingbird, or The Great Gatsby.  That's kind of a hard thing to attain and harder still to stay there.  While one should probably strive for that level, I wouldn't be too disappointed about never feeling like you got there.

So where do you feel your writing is at?