Should You Focus On Writing Quality Or Quantity?

The question is fundamentally flawed.

The quality versus quantity debate is what tears a writer apart. You want to write a ton but you’re afraid the more you write and the faster you get, the quality of your writing declines.

So what should you focus on?

Spend time hitting publish a dozen times an hour. Because if you put everything and anything out there, at some point, something will stick. Just keep pumping out mediocrity and don’t look back. The volume will draw the masses and eventually someone important will notice. They’ll see your name so many times that it’s impossible for them to forget who you are…

Not really…

You’ve heard the saying “Practice makes perfect” as if you aim to write as much as you can, you will eventually get results; however, this isn’t true if you’re doing the same thing, over and over again without actually getting better.

It’s like throwing a basketball with the same arm angle, feet placement, hand position, a thousand times and missing every shot.

You might get faster and you might produce more but do you reach perfection? No, it becomes practice makes more practice. And writing for the sake of writing leads to a dull and forgettable performance.

So should you put effort into quality then?

Spend weeks or even months drafting, editing, re-working, formatting, wordsmithing the crap out of a single article. Because only a perfect story gets rave reviews, draws tons of traffic, earns you all the monies, followers, reads, claps, likes, shares, attracts the attention of highly coveted publications, lands you that million-dollar book deal…

Not true either; it’s not about spending all your time trying to write the best article, excessively pondering the perfect words to use, constantly questioning whether the sentence is succinct enough, and overthinking and overanalyzing every paragraph.

So what should you focus on?

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