Quality Writing vs Quantity Writing
Do you want to write for the sake of making money? Or Do you want to write for the love of writing?
There is no substitute for good writing. You cannot wake up tomorrow and churn out a hundred blog posts hoping you’ll be paid for writing.
Technically you can in this day and age. The volume metric has worked wonders for people but do you want that?
Is that why you picked the pen and started jotting down your thoughts?
When you decided to write, when you decided to pick the pen and wrote the first essay or that poem or that story did you think about volume or quality?
Quality and volume can not go together, not even through a machine. AI can churn out more articles than we can process, but one look at those articles and you wouldn’t touch any AI tool with a ten-foot pole.
I am a creative writer and I am fine working for days and months brooding over a story. When I think I have a story my first task is to write that story into a multi-page outline. That multi-page outline then transforms into a chapter-wise outline. This is followed by the first draft, then the second, and then the final one.
Then comes the editing which always reminds me of Dante’s Inferno. It reminds me that the layers of hell are paved with editors inclined to make you deliver the perfect product.
Chasing volume is stupidity. We need to ask ourselves the purpose behind the volume. What do we seek through churning out hundreds of articles? Is it the recognition that you are a prolific writer? Is it the money that can potentially flow because of your prolificity?
Wouldn’t it become another form of rat race then? Wasn’t the avoidance of the rat race the primary reason for picking the pen? If we are still running behind the money what was the point of anything? I want to write because I love writing, I want to make money from that but not at the cost of anything.
Writing is not a cost you pay to get more money, it is the prize in itself.
I like to outline all my articles (including this one) like I outline all of my stories before I begin to structure them cohesively. As a writer, you’d love to edit and restructure your quality pieces as opposed to the ones you wrote for eyeballs. Even when no one’s reading them you’d want to write more such essays and blog posts because you enjoyed putting down your thoughts. This is the gift of quality writing.
I’d rather focus on writing a good long 500–2000 word essay focusing on one core issue than churning out low-quality 300-word essays every day.
I wrote a 3 part series on Astrology. I covered why science refutes Astrology, what is the science behind this madness, and whether we have any free will at all.
I am proud of that work because it took some serious effort to collate the data and all the corresponding arguments and formulate it in the form of essays.
I want to write many such essays and stories where I affect people’s lives.
Regardless of the month, year, or era, my essays are written with a singular purpose in mind — to change the mindset of the reader, and to impact the reader’s thought process.