#quantity vs quality

Hello writerly friends!

Today, let's talk about productivity, especially about quantity versus quality. Michelle Schusterman had a great post about this in her substack newsletter:  https://michelleschusterman.substack.com/p/on-daily-word-count-goals-and-toxic

If you want to be good at the thing, you have to practice the thing. You have to smear the paint on the canvas. You have to pick up the instrument and honk. You have to accept that your art, your music, your photos, your writing, is not going to be good in the beginning.

Because quantity, especially in the beginning, is just practice. That's why it really bothers me that we have a versus thing set up here when it comes to writing and word count goals. Is it better to get a ton of words, or focus on the quality of those words?

Quality versus quantity—but they aren’t rivals. Because the reality is we need both. We need quality, obviously, we want our writing to be good, quality is the end goal. But we also need quantity because novels are made up of a quantifiable number of words.

This aligns with the common advice to "write every day, write as much as you can". And I think this advice is valid, even though most people who have lives and jobs can't write every day. As Michelle says, "a lot of words" is a relative expression. A lot of words are not the same for every writer.

There's also the expression "the first one million words are just for practice". More writing is always better, even if some sections are not as good as others. It doesn't matter. If you're worried about quality, tell yourself "it's just for practice", because that's just what it is. Just practice.

Write more words!

Inohima week 2020 @inohimaweek

Use-value is essentially concrete; it is a qualitative function, composed of sensuous and intellectual distinctions with other aspects of the world, including other use-values. Being qualitative, it retains the essential feature of differentiation, that distinct elements can recognize one another and form links and associations. Use-values can be deformed when they come to express alienated ways of being -- what else can be said, after all, about use-values such as are expressed by a TV game show, or any of the commodities that reflect false needs -- sports utility vehicles, lite beer, fashion magazines, hand guns, and so on. But because they are also concrete, they can be restored, as a 'used' article can be mended and made to shine. Indeed, the mending of the ecological crisis requires precisely such a restoration.

Not all use-values are attached to commodities. However, all commodities have a use-value, since no one would purchase anything or exchange it for something else unless it has some utility. But they also have another kind of value, arising from the fact of exchangeability that attaches to all commodities: exchange-value. Here, in sharp contrast to use-values, the sensuous and concrete are eliminated by definition and a priori. All that is retained as the mark of exchangeability is quantity: this item, x, is exchangeable for so many of y, which in turn is exchangeable for so many of z, and so forth, with no intrinsic end. Any concrete quality will break the chain; only number suffices, and money becomes the embodiment of that number. Hence money is fundamentally quantity, which becomes its use-value.

[Georg Simmel writes]: 'The quantity of money is its quality. Since money is nothing but the indifferent means for concrete and infinitely varied purposes, its quantity is the only important determination so far as we are concerned. With reference to money, we do not ask what and how, but how much.'

There is nothing else in the universe like it. Use-values require the participation of nature, but exchange-values are made by quantifying nature. The ascension of quantity over quality gives these relations the capacity for evil once the value function is advanced to the center of the social stage, as in capitalism. In this loss of the sensuous and concrete, the abstracting function is abandoned to the delusions of power. Precisely because nature has been detached, with its limits and inter-relations, in short, its ecosystems, there is no longer any internal limit to the value function. It can expand effortlessly. Pure quantity can swell infinitely without any reference to the external world, even though the quantity-using creature remains very much in that world. And if there is some will-to-power in the creature who makes for himself this value function, carried forward from traditional modes of domination, then that, too, can go to infinity."