Quality Versus Quantity

Choose Your Fighter in the Ages-Old Deathmatch

My desk is a terrible mess. I often write in the middle of a cluttered space, my office being the one room in the house where I am allowed to have as much chaos as I can tolerate (sometimes more)—meaning my partner does not come in and tidy it, unless I reach the point of overwhelm and ask for help.

Earlier in my life I often had a neat and organized work surface while the rest of the room around and behind me was bedlam. Now there is video conferencing so all the office supply detritus has migrated to the work surface where the camera doesn’t see it. There is a minimum amount of mayhem always nearby me; I have to keep it somewhere. I wish I could say, “Oh I have to have an organized space for writing.” I want to be that kind of person. But I am not.

Anyway enjoy this dispatch from the chaos trenches, in which we consider the merits of focusing on quality versus quantity in one’s writing pursuits, which obviously includes drafting—do you try for fewer, more elegant words or write a greater volume of garbage words faster?—but is not limited only to drafting. Quality versus quantity decisions in writing also include:

• Querying many agents or only your top choices?

• Submitting to lots of literary markets or only the ones most likely to accept you?

• Working on many projects at once or focusing on only one?

And so on. Further, this circumstance isn’t limited only to writing but applies in all sorts of creative situations and other life pursuits, such as deciding whether to apply to many jobs or hold out for the perfect opportunity.

Everyone is working with a limited amount of resources. Every single person. No one has unlimited resources. If someone is blessed to have more money than they will ever be able to spend no matter how hard they try, they are still limited by the time they have on this planet with electricity powering their brain. Not everybody has the same amount of resources to begin with, and not everybody amasses the same quantity of acquirable resources during their lifetime—but everybody runs out of time and brain juice eventually. 

We all have to decide—all the time, every day—how to distribute the resources we have. Our precious natural resources like time, energy, and creativity, and our artificial resources like money (which sometimes is generated by our labor, a natural and inherent resource), which buys necessities and conveniences, the latter of which can lead to . . . more available time and energy. There’s always a choice of where to put the creative time and energy you have left over (if any) after securing the things you need to live. Into how many endeavors will you invest it, and which?

In light of the above, I have good news. The choice between either quantity or quality is a false equivalence. Quality and quantity are not opposites. Quality is not the result of putting your resources into fewer things and quantity the result of putting those same resources into more things. Quality is the end result of quantity. Quantity breeds quality.

Yay, you don’t have to choose after all. Just do as many things as you can instead of focusing on making each individual thing good. That’s the answer, we solved it friends. The end, see you next Tuesday.

Just kidding I have more.

I will reference a parable I have seen a lot of places. It comes from David Bayles and Ted Orland’s Art & Fear; you can find an examination on this blog. 

To summarize, a ceramics instructor on day one of class separates their students into two groups: One group who will be graded on quantity and the other on quality. Individuals in the first group will receive an automatic A grade in the class if they turn in 50 pounds of pottery or more. Those in the second group will receive an automatic A grade for turning in one piece, but it must be perfect. Evaluating all of the pottery at the end of the course, the instructor found that all the highest-quality pieces came from the quantity group and none from the quality group.

This feels surprising but makes perfect sense. No amount of preparation, sketching, measuring, research, and theorizing about ceramics will generate a perfect piece of pottery on someone’s first try at making pottery. Nothing is ever good on our first try at it. Remember, to do something well you must first do it badly—a lot of times.

I have been writing short stories most of my life, an embarrassingly long time, for I am ancient. I can remember writing a complete short story when I was twelve. It wasn’t good. Not only was it an early or a first attempt, but also I was twelve. That’s fine. I wrote more of them in high school. I wrote more of them in college. They were better but they weren’t good. I’m still writing them today. How long does it take to get good? Friend, I’ll let you know.

My point is nobody puts out their best work on the first try (except M Night Shyamalan). There’s only one way to build a skill. Hint: Staring at the ceiling and visualizing yourself being good at the skill is not that one way. Take my word for this, I’ve tried.

Author Kameron Hurley writes a short story each month, twelve per year. Anyone who puts out twelve short stories a year is going to be better at writing short stories than the person who spends all year writing one (which, at the rate I work, is where I’m at). Ray Bradbury famously wrote hundreds of short stories and advised writers to aim for one per week: “At the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones.”

That’s the second part of the quantity breeds quality argument. First, the more pieces you make the more practice you get and the more mistakes you learn from. Second, the more attempts you make the more chances you have for a lucky success irrespective of your increasing skill level. 

Sometimes, somebody has a stroke of genius or luck and produces something better than their abilities or skills suggest they should be able to. Sometimes you just land a punch above your weight and you can’t understand or explain why. If you punch 100 times, you have 100 chances to land that lucky blow. If you only punch once your odds are abysmal. Unless you are One-Punch Man—who, by the way, also practiced a whole lot before he got so good at punching.

Now, this isn’t to say just go hog-wild and do everything. If I had ten creative resource units to spend and I spent them making one scarf, one ceramic vase, one necklace, one ashtray shaped like Minas Tirith, one sweater, one dress, one painting of dogs playing poker, one short story manuscript, one macramé plant hanger, and one pair of pajamas, I would not finish with any quality items to show for my efforts. I’d have ten amateur attempts at ten different things. On the other hand, if I spent those ten creative resource units on ten paintings of dogs playing poker, by the tenth I might have a good one. Maybe. Never trust the Great Dane, she’s bluffing.

Leveraging quantity has many applications outside building creative skills. For instance, the idea that one should find a permanent life partner on one of their earliest forays into adult romantic relationships and then stay in that partnership till one dies is absurd. Why would we expect someone to be good at long-term relationships without any practice at nurturing and maintaining long-term relationships? It’s like the ceramics. Every now and then there’s a great first try down to luck or an unexpected virtuoso, but most of us have to ruin a few in the learning process before getting anything good. It doesn’t mean you’re bad at relationships if your first attempt isn’t perfect.

Likewise, this follows in applying for jobs as I mentioned earlier. Is it better to spam your resume out to any opportunity that looks remotely appropriate or wait for something perfect to come along? No one, not even the unfairly charismatic among us, is born good at job interviews. Interviewing well is a skill that requires practice. The more applications you fill, the more interviews you get, the better you get at interviewing. If you wait for the absolutely perfect opportunity to come along before you toss your hat in the ring, you’ll go into that interview without the practice you need to be successful. 

This is not to say that prioritizing quantity to cultivate quality doesn’t have its drawbacks. I want to address a drawback and then draw your attention to a caveat before I let you go.

Fact is, rejection always stings. Always. You can develop a thicker skin against the sting over time, inure yourself to the venom, and learn to embrace rejection as feedback for improvement, but it never feels good to get rejected. The more job applications you turn in, the more writing you submit for publication, the more ceramic pots you try to sell on Etsy—whatever—in your pursuit of a success, you will accumulate rejections. It’s a numbers game. No matter how good and how marketable something is, most things get rejections or go through a few iterations before they get to a yes. 

I often counsel people in pursuit of a new job that, in the course of your professional life, you will not get the job you apply for more times than you will get the job you apply for. That won’t be universally true, I’m sure someone out there got the first job they applied for and stayed in it their whole life, but for most of us this is true. It only makes sense to start getting those rejections out of the way as soon as you can, to bring you closer to your yes.

But applying for jobs, querying agents, and submitting manuscripts takes an investment of time and hope. Disappointed hopes drain these resources, and too much disappointment will crush your motivation to keep going. That’s a fact, there’s no point in putting on a big fake smile and pretending it’s not true. Only you know how many rejections it takes to discourage you. Only you can manage your disappointment-related burnout. 

Work on building up your rejection tolerance over time, but never let anyone tell you, “There’s just no downside, it can’t hurt to apply” to every job you see or submit your piece to every market you can find. There is a downside. It will hurt. Ignore this at your peril.

Finally, a caveat that is specific to some of the pursuits mentioned herein though not all. When you’ve made a piece of pottery, fired it and glazed it, the piece is complete. You can learn from it, figure out what you want to do better or different next time, but that piece is done and has become immutable. You cannot improve it further, and neither can you make that exact piece again.

With writing, as with interpersonal relationships, once you have gotten the practice you need or experienced a stroke of luck or genius and produced something with true potential—it’s not finished. Your work is not done. Just because you produce a viable draft after much practice with perhaps many nonviable drafts behind you does not mean that draft is now finished, immutable, and unable to be improved. You still have to revise. We all have to revise.

I will return on Tuesday to farewell August with you. A few more articles remain before the one-year anniversary of existence in September, so if there are any topics you would like to see in the first year of Shelf Life, now’s the time to tell me.

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