Practice Makes Perfect -- Maybe
Pretty much everybody who gives advice to aspiring writers agrees that practice is essential to reaching a professional level of competence. You must write, you must finish what you write, and you must write on a regular basis.
However, there seems to be two major schools of thought on how to go about accomplishing that practice. The first school holds that you should polish each story to your very best ability before sending it out, then rewrite it after each rejection. The other school holds that you should write quickly, look the finished story over for obvious gaffes, and then send it out and move right along to the next, and that rewrites are really useless for beginning writers, for the simple reason that beginners often don't understand what's wrong with the story or how to fix it, even with a critique. The best way of improving one's writing is to write the next story, and the next one, and so forth.
There are plenty of things to say in favor of each approach -- and plenty of ways each approach can go wrong for a person ill-suited to it. The perfectionist may end up spending a lifetime perfecting a single story, and never get it where it might be read, while the impatient writer might flood markets with clumsy efforts that will damage their brand. The person who struggles to learn by osmosis may pick up all the wrong things in their efforts at immersive reading of the genre, while another budding writer may end up reinforcing instead of eliminating bad habits by massive amounts of daily writing.
The rise of indie publishing has complicated the issue. In the old days, when traditional publishing was the only game in town unless you wanted to get your name soiled with vanity publishing, one's apprentice efforts would make the circuit of available markets and then disappear into the "trunk," the repository of abandoned works. Now beginning writers can easily flood the major distribution platforms with those apprentice efforts -- and quite possibly lead to readers associating their names with clumsy writing and other beginner issues, even long after the writer's skill has gone beyond those fumbling early efforts.
However, there seems to be two major schools of thought on how to go about accomplishing that practice. The first school holds that you should polish each story to your very best ability before sending it out, then rewrite it after each rejection. The other school holds that you should write quickly, look the finished story over for obvious gaffes, and then send it out and move right along to the next, and that rewrites are really useless for beginning writers, for the simple reason that beginners often don't understand what's wrong with the story or how to fix it, even with a critique. The best way of improving one's writing is to write the next story, and the next one, and so forth.
There are plenty of things to say in favor of each approach -- and plenty of ways each approach can go wrong for a person ill-suited to it. The perfectionist may end up spending a lifetime perfecting a single story, and never get it where it might be read, while the impatient writer might flood markets with clumsy efforts that will damage their brand. The person who struggles to learn by osmosis may pick up all the wrong things in their efforts at immersive reading of the genre, while another budding writer may end up reinforcing instead of eliminating bad habits by massive amounts of daily writing.
The rise of indie publishing has complicated the issue. In the old days, when traditional publishing was the only game in town unless you wanted to get your name soiled with vanity publishing, one's apprentice efforts would make the circuit of available markets and then disappear into the "trunk," the repository of abandoned works. Now beginning writers can easily flood the major distribution platforms with those apprentice efforts -- and quite possibly lead to readers associating their names with clumsy writing and other beginner issues, even long after the writer's skill has gone beyond those fumbling early efforts.