Life, Writing, Weirdness

Another Ray Bradbury quote: “Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you’re doomed.”

It’s a writer’s take on an old refrain, something that might even be a cliché at this point. Sometimes, you’ll see it stated different ways, like: How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice. It’s the same thing. However you want to say it, the sentiment can be roughly translated as, the more you do something, the better you get at it. Seems obvious, no? Except for writers, it doesn’t always seem to be, hence Bradbury stating it so specifically.

So many people spend so much time getting every paragraph, sentence, or word absolutely perfect that they rarely finish anything. They’re not getting the quantity there and probably not getting the quality they’d like, either. Quality takes practice. The more you draft, the better you’ll get at drafting. The more you edit, the better you’ll get at editing. These are skills like any other.

In the almost 19 years since I started tracking, I’ve finished the first draft on something slightly over 400 stories (final draft status is probably only about half that number). The count is fuzzy as I’m not sure all of the stories I included in The Undead have been properly counted – there were a bunch of title changes. That only counts drabbles and above; I could probably bump that number to around 50 if I found all of the micro-fiction I’ve tried in that time.

Let’s make the math easy and call it 20 per year. And I’m at 17 so far this year, but the number of flash pieces is a bit higher than normal. But taking averages, that would work out to 8 flash stories (under 1000 words), 9 short stories (1000-7500 words), 2 Novelettes/Novellas (7501-40000), and 1 novel with substantial progress on a second.

Are they all worth reading? Absolutely not. In fact, some of them will not be seen by other human eyes while I live. But some of them are pretty damned good. The evidence I have of that is that when I’m submitting regularly, I sell a story here and there. Of my indie-published work, I sell a few copies here and there, once in a while even hard copy.

But if I looked at some of the things I wrote in the first two-ish years I was tracking word counts, most of those haven’t sold (or got published by me) and most of the ones that haven’t probably don’t deserve to (some of them did, and some of them still deserve to). Sure, I may like them, and that’s good, but they’re probably not good enough to put in front of other eyes.

And that’s okay.

The point is more that I could have kept polishing those for a really long time. They could have gone through many, many drafts and become far more readable. But would they be better than the thing I went on to write after them?

And that’s not to say that everything I’ve written recently is worth publishing, but I’d probably suggest the proportion of them that are has increased. And I continue to draft new stories at a faster rate than I edit previously drafted ones. That’s not likely to change. The more I write, the greater the chances that any given story will be good.

Lemony Snicket, other than being a famous children’s book author, is often quoted or paraphrased for have said something like, “It is likely I will die next to a pile of things I was meaning to read.” He’s not alone. I strongly resemble this remark. Many readers do.

But as a writer, there’s another sentence that works, too. It is likely I will die with a large folder of stories I was meaning to edit.

Drafting or editing. I should probably be doing one of those right now.

Be well, everyone.