Quantity or Quality?

It's Thursday. It's raining. And my pants are digging in at the waistband. Days like this are good for only one thing . . . curling up with a good story. Ready, children? Grab your milk and cookies and listen up.

"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."

excerpt taken from Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland

So, what's the moral of the story kids? You got it . . . sometimes quality comes through the production of quantity. I'm not saying this works every dang time. Pounding out gibberish day in and day out is still going to reap gibberish. But (and I've always got a big but) the drive to put out the best product you can on a consistent basis has a way of honing your craft to a fine edge.

Now get out there and write, little cowboys. Keep creating and you'll birth something that will make you and your readers smile.