I still like to take jabs at the quantity-only people. It’s not as if I have completely flipped sides. Quality is still important and I wouldn’t ever advocate for publishing every day in the hopes that the blind repetition will automatically make you better.

You do have to struggle with your writing to improve. You do have to reflect on it and mull it over to learn how to make something better.

I don’t see how you can become a good writer if you just blurt out anything and then hit publish. But eventually, you become good enough and then it’s foolish to still obsess to the point where it takes you forever to publish something.

A piece is never perfect and it’s always a compromise. And it’s important to not be so pigheaded that you’re unwilling to compromise a bit of quality to become more prolific. This is especially true since there are obvious advantages to producing more content.

There are also diminishing returns. For instance, if you write your first draft in an hour, and then spend another two hours revising it, that piece should be pretty decent. Now, you could spend another three hours revising it and it would make it even better. But will it make it so much better that you wouldn’t be better off using those three hours to produce another piece? If you’re a beginner, maybe yes. But if you know for a fact that you can write well enough, then probably not.

And yes, absolutely, it is heartbreaking to spend ridiculous amounts of time on a piece and then see it flop. It’s happened to me countless times, which is what made me reconsider my approach.