Write more. That’s the goal. It’s always the goal. Even when it is crap, write even more. By doing so, the hope is that through all the detritus some precious ore will be discovered. Maybe.
Every morning I get up, fart around for some time, then I finally get down to doing the dirty work: writing. From blog post to attempts at furthering the progress of stories, coffee is downed and keys are pounded in the attempt to place words in an order to accomplish these goals. Sometimes, like this morning, it feels like a futile effort.
It isn’t futile, that is known. Quantity is necessary to find that precious ore, which in this case is simply writing for the fun of it. What will entertain this writer enough to make it worth the effort?
Write, delete; write, delete. The process happens over and over. There’s a word count that is tracked. Reality is that the word count each day is higher than what is reported. Dozens of words at a time are selected and then removed as I search around for what to put down. The quantity is needed, because otherwise there wouldn’t end up being much of anything.
That fact took a lot of time to learn, and while the lesson is understood, getting beyond is continues to be a frustrating task. No writer wants to keep writing a lot of crap. We want to write brilliance each time we sit down. Even though we know that we need to write a lot to find it, writing crap over and over again that isn’t even entertaining at times… that’s the real work of being a writer.
Keep writing. That’s the goal. Eventually, enough crap will be produced that some precious ore will be found. Quantity is needed to get to the quality. It’ll never be the other way around.
Jeremy C Kester 
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