Your Own High Standards...

I agree with Styron. Many a novelist has hit the skids trying to play "top this," with their own works. That can become a carousel of crazy-making. If you are doing your very best on each and every story/novel you write, that should suffice!

William Styron Bio

William Clark Styron Jr. (1925 – 2006) was an American novelist and essayist who won major literary awards for his work. Styron was best known for his novels, including:

Lie Down in Darkness (1951), his acclaimed first work, published when he was 26;
The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), narrated by Nat Turner, the leader of an 1831 Virginian slave revolt;
Sophie's Choice (1979), a story "told through the eyes of a young aspiring writer from the South, about a Polish Catholic survivor of Auschwitz and her brilliant but psychotic Jewish lover in postwar Brooklyn".

In 1985, he suffered from his first serious bout with depression. Once he recovered from his illness, Styron was able to write the memoir Darkness Visible (1990), the work he became best known for during the last two decades of his life.