Deontec

Quantity over quality

This year, we started a daily writing exercise. The terms of engagement were:

This week, we've mixed it up a bit. We're still writing for 1 hour a day, but now we're also sharing what we've written at the end of every day.

This shift is supposed to encourage more actual writing. Whereas previously we might have spent most of the week thinking about a topic and only put pen to paper at the weekend, the new sharing schedule forces us to produce written words every single day.

Removing time to think may well result in lower quality writing. But I think that's ok for our (or at least my) purposes. For me, the primary goal of this exercise is to become a faster, more fluent writer.

When I was at university, I had to write 3 essays a week. By the end of the first term, I'd become a writing machine. Were the essays all of a high quality? Absolutely not. But they definitely improved over time. I'd like to recreate that sense of progression now.

Writing is effortful and currently feels painfully slow. When there's little pressure to actually produce something, it's very easy to get distracted. Earlier I said that in previous weeks I might have spent most of the week "thinking about a topic", but that's a generous characterisation of how I spent the time. Mostly it was procrastination until the deadline was close enough to be motivating.

In addition to the effort, there's the fear of judgement. Despite knowing all the cliches - "perfect is the enemy of good", "done is better than perfect" - the fear of producing dross leads to complete self-censorship.

So for now, I'm going to prioritise quantity over quality and hope that, as in the parable of the pottery class, the quality will inevitably follow.

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A".

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.