Author's Notes on: Quality vs. Quantity

What's better? Trick question.

I’m not feeling well recently so today’s article is going to be shorter than usual, but talking about something I’ve wanted to touch on for a while.

I’m sure we’ve all heard the sentiment of quality vs. quantity. It’s often represented something like a sliding scale. The more you invest into producing something that’s quality, the less of it you’ll be able to make, and the more you invest into making a lot of something, the lower the quality of each piece.

That’s not the end all be all of this dynamic though. I feel like it has a way of framing quantity as a purely bad thing. It can be a bad thing, but it isn’t inherently a bad thing.

To illustrate my point, I want to bring up a story I came across a few years ago (that I tracked back to a book called Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland so I could reference it here).

The story goes roughly like this:

On the first day of school, a ceramics teacher announced that he was dividing the class into two groups based only on which side of the class they’d sat.

The left side of the class would be graded on quantity. Their task was to produce as many pots as possible. They could be any shape or size, any quality good or bad, but they had to be pots. If they wanted to get an A, they had to make 50 pounds of pots.

The right side of the class meanwhile would be graded on quality. The quality side only needed to turn in a single pot, but it had to be as perfect as they could make it in order to get their A grade.

When the final day came and all the pots were turned in, the class discovered something interesting — the half of the class that was being graded on quality had produced, on average, worse pots than the people that were being measured by quantity. All the highest quality works were produced by the group being graded for quantity.

The thing is, the students that were being graded on quality spent their entire time theorizing about how the perfect pot could be made. They had researched many ideas on what would make the perfect pot, but weren’t able to execute these ideas when it came to making their own.

The group that was being graded on quantity, however, had spent the entire time making mistakes and learning from them. Each time they made a pot that was subpar, they just made another one with more knowledge of what had happened and why, growing their knowledge and honing their skills.

In my eyes, the moral of the story is this: Purposeful quantity begets purposeful quality.

The more you do something with the intent of getting better, the better equipped you are to improve at it. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t research how best to do something — that’s still valuable information that can help you — but it is saying that application is a really important part of achieving quality work.

The first time you try something, you’re not gonna be amazing at it. If you come into it expecting perfection, you’re just going to be disappointed or never even start the project at all. Analysis paralysis is a tight-gripped demon and the enemy of all creative endeavors.

You only ever get better by actually putting your theories to the test and challenging yourself. It is important that you’re being purposeful with your practice of quantity — if you’re producing a lot of quantity, but aren’t learning from your previous mistakes, you won’t magically end up with quality.

Another important thing to think about with this story is the fear of failure. School has a way of instilling a deep-seated fear of failure in kids because it ties their entire life and future’s worth to their grades.

The students being judged by quality were told that a single project was going to determine their entire grade in the class. That is a crazy amount of pressure. In their case, there was no real chance to learn from their failures, because making a bad pot meant they wouldn’t pass the class. Failure meant everything would grind to a halt.

The students being judged by quantity didn’t have to worry about that. Even if they weren’t proud of what they’d made, each pound of pots still contributed to their grade. They could have turned in fifty pounds of barely recognizable pottery and still gotten an A, but they didn’t. They had genuine fun figuring out new ways of making pots and experimenting until they got it right. Failure to make a good pot didn’t matter as much because they were able to fail forward instead of being stopped dead in their tracks by one mistake.

Writing is the same way.

Even if you aren’t proud of everything you’ve written, it’s all still contributing to making you a better writer. You can discover genuine enjoyment out of experimenting with new styles and genres to find your voice and interests, and through that practice, you’ll grow your skills.

Even if you drop the ball on your story’s themes super hard or write the clunkiest scene ever, it’s not the end of the world. You learn for next time and/or go back and revise it to your liking.

Failure and mistakes are a natural part of the process. They are the pull back on the bowstring that can propel you forward towards your goals.

There’s no such thing as failing so long as you’re willing to learn from it, and that’s how quantity becomes quality.

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