I was very kindly tagged in a Twitter thread today with a lovely compliment about my daily writing habits. Does quantity have its own quality? As I close in on a thousand posts I think my answer is a strong “maybe!”
Examples:
@tylercowen writing a post a day, a column a month and a book a year for two decades
Kanye’s “5 beats a day for 3 summers”
Seinfeld’s “Don’t break the chain” one joke a day. Reply from Alan Simon @ almostmedia She’s not for everyone, but she’s been very dedicated and is approaching her 1,000th daily post.
One aspect of creation that is perhaps a bit understudied is just how much it is dominated by the truly prolific. The outliers practice a lot. Every single day I practice because I both enjoy it and I trust that doing a thing over time improves the thing. You can imagine how this predisposition makes me sympathetic to Calvinism.
I credit hippie parenting and the Waldorf curriculum. I was taught early on that it was good to make things even if you sucked at it. So I just spent a lot of my time sucking at creative endeavors and not finding it all that discouraging as I don’t mind being embarrassed.
So I suppose my quantity has demonstrated its own quality in its sheer persistence. Reminding yourself to do a daily practice has its benefits over time if you can stand it. Personally for me writing has always has a kind of blind optimism that has never been beaten out of me. I am a writer. I write. If it every becomes more than that I wouldn’t mind but I don’t need it to. The thing has been it’s own reward.