Quality Over Quantity: A Follow Up
When the best laid plans fail
A couple months back, I wrote an article. I planned to decrease my publishing frequency here on Medium in favor of taking my time with each story, working to get it in the best possible shape before sending it out into the world.
This was a response to reading a lot of what I will call “undercooked” writing on the platform. I stand by what I said in that story.
However…
Anyone who has follows me will have noticed that, since that story, I haven’t published anything. There are a number of reasons for this. Some of them have to do with me being swamped with other work that kept me sprinting until just recently.
But if I’m honest, the reality is that I just didn’t prioritize publishing on Medium. My demand for extreme extreme quality resulted in a quantity of zero.
What can we learn from this?
Let’s start with the obvious. If you don’t prioritize, something, it doesn’t happen. It gets pushed to the next day, and the next, and the next, until suddenly, you realize that your goal, however lofty, has no practical way of being accomplished. Unless you jam that baby into your schedule, come hell or high water, you can forget about ever producing anything of quality, or anything at all.
Second, while I still believe quality is more important than quantity, quantity has a lot to recommend it. Any successful writer will tell you this. The more you write, the better you get and the more you increase your chances of creating something really excellent. If you keep working on one story, revising and revising and revising, trying to get it perfect, I have bad news for you: you’ll never get there, and you’ll kill any chances for advancing in your writing career. You need to keep the mill working if you’re going to make that bread.
Lastly, I want to give kudos to the writers who prioritize their output on here, even if their work (in my opinion) leaves something to be desired. I’m just one guy, after all, and quite possibly, I’m a snob. So what if I don’t read your writing? There may be thousands — tens of thousands!—of people who do. One does not need to be Stephen King, or Michael Crichton, or Daniel Polansky, to have a thoroughly successful writing career. If you have an audience that enjoys your writing, then you’ve won. Heck, if you have a body of work that exists because you created it, then you’ve won! It’s impossible, if you have any kind of talent, to really try to improve as a writer and fail.
I suppose what I’m saying is this: I realize that I need to back off my hardcore commitment to quality and turn the dial a little back toward the quantity side. The dream is to have the needle on both at the same time, but as we all know, that‘s exceedingly rare, and the important thing is that we keep on producing.
That’s what I want to remind you of, my friends. Keep on writing. If you write, you win.
Thanks for reading. For more thoughts and musings, follow me on Twitter and Instagram and subscribe to my podcast. If you think the story above was worth paying for, you can say thanks in whatever amount you like via the Cash App at the link below. Godspeed. I’ll see you out there.