Quantity Creates Quality

Everyone knows the story of the pottery class divided in two groups… one was graded by how many pots they made, the other half was graded on how good the pot was. Inevitably, the students who were creating for quantity created better quality pots. Why? Because the more you do something the better you get at it.

No writing is ever wasted. No time spent creating art is ever wasted.

So what if you wind up trunking a novel and throwing it away? I threw out all my notes from seventh grade, too (actually – I set them on fire – but that’s another story). Does that mean I forgot everything I learned in seventh grade? No! What I learned stayed in my head.

So you spend time writing a book and hit a point where you realize it isn’t going to work. The market is wrong, you don’t love it any more, there’s no villain, whatever… you save it, close it, and open a new document and start a new story. That time invested was time you spent learning.

You know what happens when you create your first selling piece? A few years later you’re going to look back at that book that was your Very Best Story Ever and realize it kinda sucks. What happened? … well, if you didn’t stop writing after that first sale, you’ve spent hundreds of hours writing, creating, and improving. Even if you only spend thirty minutes a a day writing, that’s 182 hours of dedicated practice. And most authors spend 30-40 hours a week writing, reading, or studying writing. That’s a thousand hours a year.

After several years and several thousand hours of practice, your old best record is no longer your best.

This is all really easy to say, but it’s really hard for some people to put in practice because it means letting books go. It means that, sometimes, you have to retire a story. Give up. Quit. Walk away. Start over. And not start over by rewriting the same story a new way, but start over with new characters in a new universe with a new plot.

Eleven years ago I joined an online critique group just for fun. Over the years a group of us got together, started pushing each other to take our writing further, and we grew our careers together. Every single one of them that went on to have a career in publishing is an author who knew who to let a story go.

It’s tough… so very tough! I cried the first time I had to give up my favorite series. I still dream about bringing it back. But I knew, realistically, that the writing, plot, and content were not good enough for publication.

The writers who didn’t learn how to let a series go and move on are still unpublished. They’re still editing stories they wrote ten years ago and refusing to either kick the book out the door, or stuff it at the bottom of the hard drive. It’s hard to let go, but you to progress as a writer, really to progress with any form of art, you need to know when to stop. The painter needs to know when to walk away and stop adding layers. The singer needs to know where the song ends and when to let their voice rest. The actor knows they need to play different roles. And they all know that you can do this without being a failure.

No work is wasted as long as you learned something from it.

So, take a deep breath, evaluate your work honestly, and don’t be afraid to start something new because the more you create, the better you’ll get.