Quantity over Quality

Thoughts on the creative process.

I think quantity is better than quality when it comes to creative work. To make a substack column, I usually write a lot, then cut down to a few carefully crafted sentences designed for maximum accuracy and meaning. Cutting 10,000 words down for a single Substack piece takes too long, and I always second guess a sentence as soon as it is written down.

I’ve come to hold the opinion that creativity has nothing to do with creating quality, and has everything to do with the ability to attend to quality when it presents itself. It involves putting your conscious attention on quality, and extracting the signal from the noise. As an example, this idea (about creativity) was not fully created by me; it was partially taken from the musings of Robert’s alter-ego, Phaedrus, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, where he talks about a final product being significant because it has quality. I took the idea of quality, which I saw as having quality, and applied it more broadly to the creative process in general.

I remember a story about an art teacher who had one class of students spend a quarter making one perfect pot. Then he had another class spend the quarter making a thousand pots, and at the end, the class that made a thousand pots had a better product than the class that made just one “perfect” pot. To create the perfect product, you have to make the entire pot badly, then remake the pot to be a little better. That’s the editing process in a nutshell. When I write on a topic for the first time, the end product is nowhere near perfect. That’s why I rewrite each text, edit it, and rewrite again over the course of a week to sharpen the aim of the text, and make it worth sharing.

So the approach for Substack has changed, Now it starts with a bunch of bad drafts working toward a final goal and it will be edited and edited, until the final product begins to take form. New columns build towards a defined goal, as the ideas become more and more clear..