Writing and Work
superversive has posted a riff on the difference between hard work and working hard. He says, in part:
A pernicious belief is making the rounds, encouraged by some of the great gurus of self-publishing and self-promotion. The idea is that you have to pay your dues as a writer, by writing some set quantity (some say 500,000 words, some say a million) of inferior prose, after which you will magically become a Commercial Writer, and be able to make a fine living if only you are prolific enough, and never have to learn anything again - at least about writing; you will always have more lessons about marketing to learn from the gurus. It is the Gospel according to Drudge; the fatal promise that you will never have to do hard work - that working hard is enough. But in this game, to stop learning is to repeat yourself, and to repeat yourself is to begin to die.
To write prolifically is a good thing, but it is not the best thing; it is not even the best thing for a writer as such. Be prolific for practice, be prolific to expose your work to more readers, be prolific to try out new techniques and reduce the risk that attends a failure. But for the love of all the Muses, don’t be prolific for the mere sake of commercial success; and don’t expect that writing ever-larger quantities of the same old stuff will push you over the threshold of commercial success. In the end, quantity is only a multiplier; it is quality that sells. Ten bad stories may sell ten times as much as one bad story; but one good story will outsell a thousand bad ones, and one great story will outlast all the merely good stories you could ever write.
A pernicious belief is making the rounds, encouraged by some of the great gurus of self-publishing and self-promotion. The idea is that you have to pay your dues as a writer, by writing some set quantity (some say 500,000 words, some say a million) of inferior prose, after which you will magically become a Commercial Writer, and be able to make a fine living if only you are prolific enough, and never have to learn anything again - at least about writing; you will always have more lessons about marketing to learn from the gurus. It is the Gospel according to Drudge; the fatal promise that you will never have to do hard work - that working hard is enough. But in this game, to stop learning is to repeat yourself, and to repeat yourself is to begin to die.
To write prolifically is a good thing, but it is not the best thing; it is not even the best thing for a writer as such. Be prolific for practice, be prolific to expose your work to more readers, be prolific to try out new techniques and reduce the risk that attends a failure. But for the love of all the Muses, don’t be prolific for the mere sake of commercial success; and don’t expect that writing ever-larger quantities of the same old stuff will push you over the threshold of commercial success. In the end, quantity is only a multiplier; it is quality that sells. Ten bad stories may sell ten times as much as one bad story; but one good story will outsell a thousand bad ones, and one great story will outlast all the merely good stories you could ever write.