Put the question to Mia Martin — what makes a story worth telling? — and she pauses before answering. The South Florida author does not go for quick responses, and this is a question she has been working through for most of her writing life. Her answer, when it arrives, is exact.
“A story worth telling is one the writer couldn’t have not written,” she says. “That’s the only test I trust.”
This puts urgency at the centre and marketability nowhere in the picture. Martin is clear-eyed about how that sounds. She understands the commercial side of publishing and she does not dismiss the elements of craft — structure, pacing, character development — that turn a raw impulse into something a reader can actually inhabit. But she does not waver in her belief that technique without anything driving it produces polished work that disappears without trace. That, for her, is the worst outcome.
The discipline of writing, in Martin’s view, has little to do with word targets or timetables. It has more to do with the ongoing effort of staying honest about what a story is genuinely about. Writers, she says, are good at deceiving themselves. A story begins with a real impulse, and then the work of drafting and revising shapes it into something smoother and more manageable. The strangeness gets removed. What began as something true and difficult becomes something easier to present.
Craft, as she sees it, is not that smoothing process. It is the work of getting back to what was strange and true in the first place.
“Revision isn’t about making it better in the sense of making it more polished,” Martin says. “It’s about making it more itself. Which sometimes means making it stranger, harder, less comfortable. The discipline is not flinching from that.”
She came to understand this, she says, by writing through the flinch — completing work that held up technically but lacked the quality she valued most in the books that had meant something to her as a reader. There was always something absent. It took time to work out what it was: the actual presence of the writer in the work. The feeling that someone had genuinely risked something on the page.
Risk is the word she comes back to. Not shock, not controversy for its own sake. The quieter and more demanding risk of writing what you truly think rather than what you expect a reader to want. Of following a story to a conclusion that is honest rather than one that is neat. Of trusting the reader enough to leave questions open.
That trust, she argues, is the highest form of craft — and the most neglected in discussions about writing. Technique is something that can be taught. The willingness to trust the reader is something a writer has to arrive at on their own, and then choose again each time they return to the work.
