If you’re waiting until the quality of your writing improves before you invest time to create quantity of writing, you will wait forever.
There’s a place for learning. For reading books on a subject. For considering theory.
But facts are facts: you can only learn so much from a book. (I say this as the author of multiple instructional books!)
There comes a time when you just have to dive in. You have to agree to stink for a while. Stinking is part of the process.
Prodigies are a lie—it’s a myth. You’re not just going to wake up good at something. Everyone you know who is good at something started by stinking at it. But they just kept doing it anyway.
It’s the doing it that makes the difference.
Until you actually start practicing, until you actually have something you’ve produced to look at, all the theory in the world won’t help you.
How to get better at anything:
If you want to get better at writing (or really anything) this is the way:
- Learn a little theory.
- Put the theory into practice over and over again.
- Learn as you go.
- Accelerate the process with good coaching.
This is how everyone does it. Everyone stuck on #1 stays on #1. That’s how being stuck works.
There’s this cliched parable about a pottery class. The students were split into two groups.
The first group only made one pot for the whole course. Every day they’d work on making their one pot better and better. They’d tinker and improve it.
The second group was told to make as many pots as they could. Every day they’d show up and make more new pots.
At the end of the course, each student presented their best pot. Which group do you suspect had the best pots?
In nearly any discipline, the group that focuses on repetitions will outperform a group that focuses on perfection. This bears out in all kinds of ambitions—arts, sports, you name it.
A real-life example:
My former apprentice, Alli Prince, is a great example of this. Her newest book, Call It Consequences, is fantastic! So many people are reading it and raving about it!
But not everything she writes has been fantastic. She has a hard drive full of short stories and novel manuscripts that will likely never be seen by another human being.
They were repetitions.
In the process of crafting something amazing, there were some dumpy pots. But the amazing thing could never come into being without the dumpy pots in between.
(For what it’s worth, you can grab Call It Consequences for your Kindle for just 99 cents this week only! Get it here: https://amzn.to/4b4EMfb It’s also free for Kindle Unlimited all the time.)
Alli executed the four steps:
- Learn a little theory.
- Put the theory into practice over and over again.
- Learn as you go.
- She accelerated the process with good coaching at The Company’s writing apprenticeship.
Now she’s a bestselling author with three books on the market.
I love Alli and I think she’s talented. But can I be real? She’s not that special. I mean don’t get me wrong, she’s a unique and wonderful person like we all are. But she’s not some prodigy. She’s just a regular person with a dream, just like you.
Except she’s willing to do the work. She’s even willing to stink at it. But she just keeps doing the work. I don’t think I could get her to stop if I tried.
And as a result, a masterpiece was born.
Your turn:
So what’s standing between you and your masterpiece?
If you want a little theory, The Novel Matrix is a great place to start. I also have a ton of courses, many of them free, over at The Company.
If you’re interested in good coaching, we also have live groups and the apprenticeship over at The Company.
But steps 2 and 3. Those are all you. Nobody can do them for you.
Nobody solves quantity by fixing quality first. That’s not how it works. Submit to the quantity, and watch your work improve.
Why not start today? You can do it.
Want to learn a little theory with The Novel Matrix? Use this form to download the first four chapters:
Just try and stop me 🫵 I’ll write stinky novels until I die 😉 Jokes aside, very good point and lowkey something I needed to be reminded of this week. The things I view as trash still serve a purpose. 🙂
This! 100%. I have so many random pages of short unfinished stories from writing prompts. And 2 novel ideas I am fleshing out. I am not published yet but the more time I spend writing The better my writing gets. The only other thing that I have found that improves my writing is reading other’s writing. The more I read the more I see how the craft is done.