Every now and then a massive tweet thread goes down on Twitter where fellow word nerds debate Quality over Quantity.
It’s like trying to prove what came first? The chicken or the egg?
Now I’d like to think that I do alright with writing and words and whatever, yet that was never the case. I was a reader as a kid. I read a lot more and never thought of myself to be a writer.
I did great in English classes. Essays were always 100% but that’s probably cause the teacher loved that I debated with them because of everything that I read.
Getting back to Twitter. Well, it’s a weird place for authors. Unless you’ve got a massive audience nobody really cares about what you write and the quality of writing you put out.
I know I put out a lot of garbage and have done so for years. Luckily as time went on. It got a lot less garbage-y.
The thing is. You need to write a lot. Write about anyone and everything. Create characters, kill them off. Write silly stories and deep poetry. Write terrible jokes and make people cringe.
The more you do it. The more you imbibe your own “style” or voice (Voice is another different topic when it comes to writing)
You need to be writing daily and you need to be doing it a lot. Not once or twice a week or month cause you’re waiting for the muse.
Anything worth doing and getting good at needs to be done a lot. You need to get through some serious quantity before you start creating quality. This applies to pretty much everything in life too.
(Keep ya mind out of the gutter…)
…but seriously.
The handful of creative friends I’ve got who get stuck just ask me the same thing over and over.
“How do I get good?”
Simple answer.
Do the work and do a lot of it. Then when you’re done. Do some more and more and more until you can’t. Then rest and then do some more.
This is a craft. Everything creative is a craft.
So get to doing the quantity so you can get to doing the quality.
Stephen Walker.